About Us

Science Speak is a scientific modeling and mathematical research company, and we speak about some science issues.

David Evans has a background in mathematics, computing, and electrical engineering. He helped build the carbon accounting model for the Australian Government that tracks carbon in plants, debris, soilds, and agricultural products. He researches mathematics, in the areas of Fourier analysis, calculus, the number system, and multivariable polynomials. While valuable, this activity pays nothing. So David has been investing on the stock market, and doing the odd consulting job, since 1990. David also has a keen interest in monetary history, banking, and detecting scams.

Joanne Nova has been explaining science as a professional speaker, TV host, radio presenter, and book author for over a decade. She's performed in town halls, five star hotels, schools, outback communities, and in a House briefing room in Washington. Her clients include professional associations of accountants, doctors, engineers, financial planners, and teachers. She explains why gold is THE place to be in a credit crisis, and how the global warming gravy train kept going long after it ran out of steam.

The Economy

Manufacturing Money, and Global Warming is a very high-level view of the current economic situation, how we got here, and what's going to happen next, with a populist edge. It's simple, not technical, and there are only two graphs. There is a connection with global warming: carbon emission permits are the latest paper currency, brought to you by the same folks who profited from the world's largest financial bubble -- same structure, same modus operandi, same beneficiaries, and the same use of exaggerations, half-truths, and tricky government statistics. Oct 2009, minor revisions Jan 2010. SPPI originally published this essay. Powerpoint.

Manufacturing Money is the version of the above with no mentions of global warming. Some people are simply not interested in hearing about global warming (quite sensible, given the emotional fracas), and others simply don't want to hear that the carbon dioxide theory of global warming has flaws or serves financial interests. This version of the essay is for them. Oct 2009, minor revisions Jan 2010.

Why Invest in Gold Now? (2004) foreshadows the current financial crisis, and explains why gold is a good investment during such times.

Our investment interests led to goldnerds.com.au, which sells subscriptions to spreadsheets that analyze gold and silver companies listed on the North American and Australian stock exchanges.

Global Warming

The missing hotspot proves that the IPCC climate theory is wrong. This article makes the case as simply as possible. (Submitted on request to The Daily Telegraph within the length-limit, but they omitted the diagram and half the text. How could anyone who just reads newspapers take skeptics seriously, when our arguments are presented so poorly? This story is a decade old, proves AGW wrong, goes to the heart of the diagreement, and has still not been published in the mainstream media anywhere in the world. When readers eventually find out, aren't they going to question the purpose of newspapers?)

A simple proof that global warming is not man-made. Now that ClimateGate has buried the fraudulent hockey stick for good (the infamous "hide the decline" remark was about hiding another fatal flaw in the methodology used to manufacture the hockey stick), it is easily to prove that global warming is not man-made: just compare the timing of our carbon dioxide emissions with the timing of global warming.

Open letter to the Australian Prime Minister, Gullible Kevin from David. Nov 2009, after Rudd's ignorant outburst about climate skepticism. Joanne wrote a withering reply to Kevin, with a great illustration!

The essence of the scientific dispute over global warming, explained simply for lay people. Revised Dec 2009. It's just over two assumptions (guesses), made in the early 1980s when there was insufficient data. One assumption has since been disproved, and the second is looking dubious. The chronology is important. The assumption was disproved in 1999, after the IPCC had been set up, Kyoto was signed, a huge bureaucracy was in place to deal with carbon emissions, and the western climate research establishment was lavishly spending billions looking to blame carbon dioxide for global warming. Too many jobs and careers were at stake for the bureaucracy and scientists to turn back. Hence the fracas.

The future of climate alarmism makes some solid predictions about what is going to happen. Written a month before ClimateGate, in Oct 2009. ClimateGate lends considerable support to these predictions.

There is no evidence for the theory that rising carbon dioxide levels are the main cause of global warming. The IPCC don't have any actual evidence, only assumptions and calculations (which include models). We have been pointing that out publicly since 2007 and have yet to be contradicted. In private correspondence, alarmist scientists concede there is no actual evidence. Instead there is accumulating evidence that the all-important climate feedbacks are in fact dampening, not strongly amplifying as implied by the IPCC's assumption that nearly all the warming since 1750 (the depth of the little ice age) is due to rising carbon dioxide levels. As of 2009 the evidence suggests that the temperature rise if carbon dioxide levels double will be around 0.6 C, and not 3.3 C as predicted by the IPCC. SPPI also published this paper.

The missing hotspot (major update Mar 2009) is the crucial evidence that disproves the theory that rising carbon dioxide levels are the main cause of global warming. Two thirds of the warming predicted by the IPCC climate models is due to water vapor feedback; in those models, the temperature rise due to rising carbon dioxide levels is amplified threefold by "feedbacks", the response of the Earth to being warmed a little by extra carbon dioxide. Any extra water vapor from feedback would expand the lower troposphere, pushing it into the colder upper troposphere, mainly at about 10 km up over the tropics -- creating a "hotspot" in a diagram of the atmospheric warming pattern. But radiosonde observations from 1979 to 1999, during the last warming, prove beyond reasonable doubt that there is no hotspot. So the carbon dioxide theory of global warming is wrong. In fact there is no extra water vapor, so the warming due to rising carbon dixode is not amplified by water vapor feedback, and the IPCC predictions of rising temperatures are overstated by at least a factor of 2.5. Powerpoint presentation (simpler).

The Classic Case of Alarmism article is a simple empirical look at the entire instrumental temperature record. It features the Akasofu graph, the antidote to the fraudulent hockey stick graph. The global temperature has been rising at a steady trend rate of 0.5 C per century since the end of the little ice age in the 1700s (when the Thames River would freeze over every winter; the last time it froze over was 1804). On top of the trend are oscillations that last about thirty years in each direction. The last warming trend was 1975 to 2001, and the pattern suggests that the world has entered a period of slight cooling until about 2030. Presumably the warming trend will continue until the global temperature recovers to what it was before the little ice age, namely during the medieval warm period (which was as warm as the Roman Optimum, and the Holcene optimum before that). April 2009.

Ocean temperatures: The New Bluff in Climate Alarmism, July 2009. The climate alarmists have switched from air temperatures to ocean temperatures to measure global warming, now that air temperatures have been going down for the last few years. But ocean temperatures have only been measured properly from mid 2003, when the Argo network became operational -- and the Argo data shows that the oceans have been cooling slightly since mid 2003. The latest alarmist claims are a bluff. The alarmist claims only appear credible if trends shorter than 10 years or longer than 50 years are ignored. But it will take time to inform the public and politicians that the alarmist’s claims are baseless. With the US climate bill now being debated and the Copenhagen climate conference coming up in December 2009, they only need to make the public believe their schtick for a few months. Also published by SPPI.

Joanne writes lively prose and draws cartoons. She wrote The Skeptics Handbook, which is achieving significant worldwide circulation (170,000 copies printed so far, in six languages), and has a very popular blog about the failure of science communicators and investigative journalists on global warming. She wrote a ground-breaking paper investigating the effects of money on climate science (July 2009).

David wrote an account of the meeting he attended between Senator Steve Fielding and Australian Climate Change Minister Penny Wong in June 2009.

The Australian newspaper published an article by David in July 2008 that became widely quoted around the world. The media coverage of the Garnaut report in Australia had made us realize that our decision makers and the public had no idea that the evidence about the causes of global warming had evolved considerably, so David wrote to a few politicians to point out the problems. At the urging of one he wrote the article. He also wrote a similar article from a different perspective.

60 Minutes ran a segment on the causes of global warming in August 2008 that featured David (use Internet Explorer, not Firefox, to watch the video), which Australian columnist Andrew Bolt thought significant.

The ABC commissioned an article from David in December 2008. It points out that proponents of the theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide caused global warming are anti-science, because they take a distinctly medieval approach to science, authority, and knowledge. It discusses why so many people still believe in that theory, despite there being no evidence for it, and it having been disproved. The ABC commissioned an article in July 2009 on ocean temperatures, so David pointed out that the Argo data shows ocean temperatures are dropping slightly -- and in particular dropped from 2004 through 2006, which contradicts Australian Climate Minister Wong who claimed in an answer to Senator Fielding that they were rising strongly in that period.

David helped create FullCAM for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Australian Department of Climate Change), from 1999 to 2005. FullCAM is a leading Carbon Accounting Model; it estimates carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. FullCAM is used to calculate the land-use portion of Australia's Kyoto Protocol compliance, calculating carbon emissions and fixations from each 25 meter by 25 meter plot across Australia, using geographical maps of climate and soils data and maps of land cover changes derived from NASA satellite imagery. It will appear soon on Google Earth.

When we started the FullCAM job in 1999, the old ice cores were supporting evidence that rising carbon dioxide levels caused global warming. But the new higher-resolution ice cores firmly established by 2003 that changes in carbon dioxide lagged the corresponding changes in temperature by an average of 800 years, so the changes in carbon dioxide cannot have caused the changes in temperature as assumed. (Gore's movie was made two years later, in 2005. It presented the ice core data as the sole reason for blaming human carbon emissions for global warming. Imagine if he had told the whole truth, that the temperature changes occurred 800 years before the cause he was alleging. Absurd! Gore has become much much richer as a result of not telling the whole truth, but no mainstream journalist seems to have noticed yet.)

By 2003 there was no longer any actual evidence suggesting that carbon dioxide emissions were a significant cause of global warming. We became skeptical. This led to a bet in May 2007 that temperatures would not rise as much as the IPCC projected. And that led to an invitation from the Lavoisier Group for David to present a paper at their meeting in Melbourne in June 2007.

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