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 researches mathematics, in the areas of Fourier analysis, calculus, the number system, and multivariable polynomials.

Joanne Nova has 15 years of experience in explaining science as a professional speaker, TV host, radio presenter and book author. 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 can explain 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.

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. David wrote Why Invest in Gold Now? in 2004, foreshadowing the current financial crisis and explaining why gold is a good investment during such times.

Global Warming

There is no evidence (minor update 1 July 2009) for the theory that CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming. The IPCC don't have any evidence, only assumptions and models. We have been pointing that out publicly for two years, and have yet to be contradicted. In correspondence with alarmist scientists they have failed to come up with evidence. Instead, there is accumulating evidence that the climate feedbacks are dampening, not amplifying as assumed by the IPCC, and that the climate sensitivity (the temperature change if CO2 levels double) is around 0.6 C and not 3.3 C as predicted by the IPCC.

The missing hotspot (major update 22 Mar 2009, minor update 1 July 2009) converted us from being merely skeptical to being pretty certain that carbon emissions were not the cause of the recent global warming (1975 to 2001). The missing hotspot proves that (1) the IPCC climate theory is fundamentally wrong, and (2) to the extent that the IPCC climate theory is correct in predicting a hotspot due to extra non-water-vapor greenhouse gases, we know that carbon emissions did not cause the recent global warming. So if the world already knows this, why is carbon emission reduction going ahead anyway? Who benefits? The biggest vested interest, far bigger than the bureaucrats, scientists, and greens dealing with the "problem" of carbon emissions, is carbon trading. Carbon emissions will soon be the world's biggest commodity market, exceeding oil, wheat, etc. Furthermore, carbon emission permits are similar to modern bank money and fiat base money: all are created out of thin air by some fortunate folks, get traded profitably by big financial institutions, then sold to the rest of us. The accompanying Powerpoint presentation discusses the same issues more simply.

Joanne writes lively prose and draws cartoons. She wrote The Skeptics Handbook, which is achieving significant worldwide circulation, and has a blog about the failure of science communicators and investigative journalists on global warming.

David attended a meeting between Senator Steve Fielding and Australian Climate Change Minister Penny Wong in June 2009.

The Australian newspaper published an article 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. The evidence backing those articles is outlined here.

60 Minutes ran a segment on the causes of global warming 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. It points out that proponents of AGW (anthropogenic global warming, the theory that human emissions of carbon caused global warming) are anti-science and take a medieval approach to science, authority, and knowledge. It discusses why so many people still believe in AGW, despite there being no evidence for it and it having been disproved.

We 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 that 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.

When we started that job in 1999, the old ice cores were supporting evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming. But the new higher-resolution ice cores firmly established by 2003 that changes in CO2 lagged changes in temperature by an average of 800 years, so the changes in CO2 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 carbon emissions for global warming. Imagine if he had told the whole truth: the temperature changes occurred 800 years before the cause he was alleging. Absurd!) By 2003 there was no longer any actual evidence that carbon emissions were a significant cause of global warming. We then became skeptical that carbon emissions were a significant cause of the recent global warming. 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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