Dick Smith Offers $1M For Proof of LENR

Dick Smith, an Australian retail millionaire, has offered a $1M prize first to an italian inventor, and now to a greek company, Defkalion, if they can demonstrate a commercial LENR (low energy nuclear reaction, aka cold fusion) to the satisfaction of third-party scientific observers.

As I am convinced this is a scam similar to Firepower International (make sure you look it up on Wikipedia) I am not prepared to waste money on this until the test conditions have been agreed on.

As with the Rossie challenge the test must be one where the result will be accepted by reasonable people in the scientific community.

I hope the Swedish scientists will be involved. If not I feel sure we can get equivalent independent experts.

Thanks for the suggestion. I would like to this live on international television- say the U S 60 minutes.

To get up to speed on this quickly moving story, read here.

Scafetta vs the IPCC

Great new application from WUWT contrasts the predictions of two models of global warming, Scafetta’s empirical resonance model and the IPCC general circulation models.

I was asked to make sense of this from Rahmstorf and Foster:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022, referenced here at RC: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=10475.

I haven’t read the paper in detail, and I find I have to do that to really assess it. So I can only comment on the general approach. Although it seems superficially plausible, its also somewhat novel, and so I am uncomfortable with it, as I don’t fully appreciate the statistical limitations.

IMHO only really scientific way to approach a question is to contrast between competing hypotheses, eg. the null versus the alternative, or other combination, such as the Scafetta vs IPCC above. Its clear, easy to understand and not so prone to biases.

But it seems like climate scientists are very creative in coming up with novel ways to justify their theory, and almost always fail to clearly compare and contrast the alternatives. That is their weakness, they are so damn convinced of CAGW, and shows they are generally ill-equipped with the expertise and training for conducting rigorous scientific analysis.

And of course, “creative” is meant not in the good sense.