Indie Lab

11/30/2025

"I repeatedly see people claiming that climate models are hopeless at predicting future warming. So I thought I'd supply a short history of predictions:

1. Fourier (1820s–1830s)
What he predicted:
The Earth should be much colder given its distance from the Sun. Something in the atmosphere must trap heat.
Accuracy:
Conceptually right. He identified the greenhouse effect before the term existed.

2. Tyndall (1859–1863)
What he discovered:
CO₂, water vapour, and methane absorb infrared radiation. Changing their concentration would change climate.
Accuracy:
Spot on. His laboratory measurements stand today.

3. Arrhenius (1896)
What he predicted:
Doubling CO₂ would warm the planet by about 4–6°C.
He even calculated the warming effect of coal burning.
Accuracy:
Astonishingly close. Modern estimates put the sensitivity at 2.5–4°C.
He was within a degree or so using pencil-and-paper maths.

4. Callendar (1930s–1950s)
(Pioneer of modern climate science)
What he predicted:
Industrial CO₂ emissions were already warming the planet.
Estimated climate sensitivity around 2°C.
Accuracy:
Broadly right. He underestimated aerosols (cooling), but his warming signal matched later observations.

5. Revelle & Suess (1957)
What they predicted:
Human emissions would accumulate in the atmosphere and raise global temperatures.
Accuracy:
Correct. This led directly to the Keeling Curve.

6. Keeling Curve (1958– )
Not a prediction — a measurement — but it underpins all modern predictions.
What it showed:
CO₂ rising exactly as expected from fossil-fuel use.
Accuracy:
Perfect record for 65+ years.

7. Manabe & Wetherald (1967–1975)
Early climate models.
What they predicted:
CO₂ increases lead to surface warming
Stratospheric cooling
Polar amplification
Greater warming over land
Accuracy:
These predictions have all occurred exactly as forecast.

8. Charney Report (1979)
First major international scientific review.
What it predicted:
Climate sensitivity: 1.5–4.5°C.
Significant warming by the 21st century.
Accuracy:
Still the accepted range today.
Charney’s central estimate is almost identical to the IPCC’s.

9. Hansen (1981, 1988)
NASA’s breakthrough modelling.
What he predicted:
Strong warming by the 2000s
Arctic amplification
More heatwaves
Ocean heat uptake
CO₂ would be the dominant factor
Accuracy:
Remarkably high.
His 1988 “Scenario B” prediction matches observed warming almost perfectly.

10. IPCC First Report (1990)
What they predicted:
~0.3°C per decade warming if emissions continued.
Sea-level rise accelerating.
Accuracy:
Very good.
Observed warming has been about 0.2°C per decade — lower because emissions followed a gentler path than the “high” scenario.

11. IPCC 2001–2021 (AR3 to AR6)
Increasingly sophisticated models.
What they predicted:
Continued warming
More extreme heat
Intensification of hydrological cycle
Arctic sea ice decline
Ocean acidification
Rising sea levels accelerating
Tipping points possible at high warming
Accuracy:
High.
The big-ticket predictions — warming, ice loss, ocean heat, sea level — have all come true, most within model uncertainty ranges.
Some changes (Arctic sea ice decline, ocean heat content) happened faster than predicted.

So, how accurate have climate predictions been overall?
In summary:
Which predictions were right?
CO₂ warms the planet (Fourier, Tyndall, Arrhenius)
Human emissions would raise atmospheric CO₂ (Revelle, Keeling)
The globe would warm steadily (Arrhenius to IPCC)
Ice would melt fastest in the Arctic
Oceans would warm and acidify
Sea levels would rise and accelerate
Heatwaves would intensify
Nights would warm faster than days
The stratosphere would cool
Heavy rainfall events would increase
Which predictions were too slow?
Arctic sea-ice loss
Ocean heat accumulation
Some glacier retreat
Some extreme weather trends
Which predictions were too pessimistic?
Almost none.
If anything, the mainstream science has been cautious.

Conclusion
Climate predictions, from the 19th century to today, have been:
Consistent
Physically grounded
Surprisingly accurate
Often conservative
The denial narrative that “scientists keep being wrong” collapses under even the briefest look at the history. Scientists have been right about global warming for over 125 years — and the warming itself has validated their work again and again."

(Seen in "Climate Change - An Open Discussion" with permission to copy/pasta:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1GMRnpBALj/

11/15/2025

ExxonMobil KNEW. ��

When the doctor gave me 20-60 left to live, I knew I had one good project left in me. And it’s for everyone’s Mom, planet Earth.

I would bike three miles and jump into the ocean to see live coral, and have always seen Mother Earth as a breathing organism. There’s always been this rhythm to her, and it’s breaking my heart that my species is breaking her breath and even our own.

So please, please give what you can to my dying wish: to return the favor for saving our breath back to those smallest things that have helped our collective wellbeing, Phytoplankton. Donate:
https://www.facebook.com/share/1DSF2hHzYw/

You see, phytoplankton makes ~70% of our home’s oxygen, and the tropical band has lost ~40% of oxygen production in just the last 50 years. As the rain falls through the carbon dioxide, it absorbs it as carbonic acid, which then dissolves the essential, protective calcium shells of the phytoplankton.

And this is how we reverse it.
With a prototype to make oil from the air using the sun, thereby leaving the oil in the ground, and letting the phytoplankton be.
They need recovery.
Hey, just like me.
LOL. ��

Thanks to others in my life, I know we can we can band together and build a future our progeny can breathe in! �

Thank you so much for joining this move towards sovereignty from Big Oil by making our own, helping organisms who support our daily living, and Mother Earth.� �

Sincerely, Christopher Maxwell
Treasurer, Indie-Lab

(Supporting peer-reviewed science is available on the Indie-Lab page.)

https://www.facebook.com/share/1DSF2hHzYw/

11/10/2025

Classic Epistemological crisis.

There’s never been a better time to be a conspiracy theorist. An MIT Technology Review series The New Conspiracy Age Everything is a conspiracy theory now. Conspiracists are all over the White House, turning fringe ideas into dangerous policy. America’s institutions are crumbling under the weigh...

11/10/2025

Or BC its really an LLM , "Large Language MODEL" that is ... MODELING the GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) on the internet where crazy uncle so-and-so theories get the same weight as the NIH.

Teaching chatbots to say “I don’t know” could curb hallucinations. It could also break AI’s business model

11/10/2025

From NASA to the National Institutes of Health, federal agencies conduct research that universities cannot. Agency scientists speak out about the irreplaceable facilities, institutional knowledge and training opportunities that the country is losing.

11/10/2025

More research pls cos "Historically, in the U.S., every era has a sedative that’s meant to resign women to their fate. One review of studies, from 2019, notes that “women are generally more likely to drink to regulate negative affect and stress reactivity.” Women’s use of alcohol to regulate stress is especially a problem because women develop alcohol-related health issues more rapidly than men. Because women’s bodies process alcohol differently, booze affects women’s brains more severely; it’s also more likely to increase their risk of liver disease and cancer.
Read more: https://theatln.tc/DDnDcNB3

Few successful women would willingly get hooked on Va**um, but many today are dosing their discomfort with alcohol, Olga Khazan wote in 2023: “Gradually, booze has become the 21st-century ’mother’s little helper.’“ https://theatln.tc/DDnDcNB3

“Women have been sold coping mechanisms for their daily lot for a long time. Coping mechanisms instead of actual solutions,” the author Holly Whitaker told Khazan. Alcohol-related hospitalizations and deaths are rising faster among women than among men. During the first year of the pandemic, women increased their “heavy drinking” days—days on which they had four or more drinks—by 41 percent, compared with 7 percent among men. Problem drinking has risen fastest among women in their 30s and 40s, the age at which many are squeezed between their career, motherhood, and aging parents.

One review of studies, from 2019, notes that “women are generally more likely to drink to regulate negative affect and stress reactivity.” Women’s use of alcohol to regulate stress is especially a problem because women develop alcohol-related health issues more rapidly than men. Because women’s bodies process alcohol differently, booze affects women’s brains more severely; it’s also more likely to increase their risk of liver disease and cancer.

Historically, in the U.S., every era has a sedative that’s meant to resign women to their fate. Read more: https://theatln.tc/DDnDcNB3

10/23/2025

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

10/23/2025

"Why bats?"

That's a question that HHMI Investigator Michael Yartsev, who spends his days trying to understand the neural computations that are happening in their brains, gets asked a lot.

For Michael, the head of the Neurobat Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, the flying mammals offer a unique opportunity to study how the brain represents 3D space.

Bat research is also a challenge. The more other scientists tell Michael, “This sounds crazy. This research will never work,” the more excited he becomes. “Most days, I’m honestly just shocked that anyone is paying me to do this.”

Michael studies the relationship between brains and natural behavior. Bats have extraordinary navigational, communication, and social skills, which have been studied under controlled laboratory settings. Michael and his team study how these behaviors work together in a naturalistic foraging situation.

The team develops wireless neural recording technologies that allow them to record hundreds of neurons simultaneously. The bats are in rapid, spontaneous flight during those recordings, creating an added technical challenge.

“My lab always starts with the most interesting question we can think of, and we assume that the question is answerable—we take a leap of faith. Only then do we start wondering how we’re going to answer it.”

10/23/2025

Journals are considering doing identity checks to expose fake authors — but there are downsides.

10/23/2025

THIS is what a proper bibliographic reference to sources looks like with real journalistic standards.

""The new findings build on results from the same group showing that, in mouse models, a generalized mRNA vaccine boosted the tumor-fighting effects of immunotherapy drugs called checkpoint inhibitors. Those results, published in July in Nature Biomedical Engineering, “really laid the groundwork” for the idea that an mRNA vaccine—even one not targeted toward any specific tumor protein—could bolster cancer immunotherapy, says Adam Grippin, a medical resident and immunotherapy researcher at MD Anderson who presented the group’s new data in Berlin on Sunday. “The next question we wanted to ask was, if this is true, what about the COVID vaccine?”
To find out, Grippin and colleagues analyzed the records of more than 1000 patients who were treated for advanced skin and lung cancer at MD Anderson between 2019 and ’23. People who received a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine within 100 days of starting immunotherapy with checkpoint inhibitors lived significantly longer than those who received the same drugs but didn’t get the vaccine. For patients with advanced lung cancer, the median survival rate nearly doubled, rising from 20.6 months to 37.3...
I’m cautiously optimistic about these results,” says Mark Slifka, an immunologist at the Oregon Health & Science University. The research still needs to be confirmed with a prospective, randomized clinical trial—something Steven Lin, a radiation oncologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and principal investigator on the work, says is already being planned...
vaccines, which consist primarily of mRNA encoding the spike protein on the surface of the pandemic coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, are designed to prompt an immune response specific to the pathogen. But based on lab studies, Grippen and his colleagues think that in cancer patients, the mRNA vaccine acts “like a siren.” It triggers the release of immune signaling proteins known as cytokines, including type 1 interferon—the same protein responsible for many of the strong side effects people experience after getting immunized. The lab data suggest interferon, in turn, activates immune cells inside tumors and causes them to move into the lymph nodes, where they train other immune cells to travel back through the bloodstream and attack the tumors.
Tumors normally respond to this assault by expressing a protein called PD-L1, which is designed to suppress the immune system. But checkpoint inhibitors block immune cells from binding to these proteins. That thwarts the tumor’s attempts at evasion and helps “unleash the power of the immune system to kill cancer,” Grippin says.
The earlier mouse work suggests any mRNA-based vaccine could have a similar effect. “It doesn’t matter what you encode,” says Lin, who notes that mRNA appears to be the “key” factor triggering the surge in inflammatory cytokines and priming the immune system for attack. In the future, he explains, scientists might be able to design a universal vaccine that works even better than spike-targeting mRNA shots.
But the idea that an already approved product such as current COVID-19 vaccines can help “jazz up” the immune system and make cancer patients more receptive to immunotherapies is “really exciting,” says Jeff Coller, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University. It would be far cheaper than developing personalized mRNA vaccines to target tumors, as some researchers are trying to do."

https://www.science.org/content/article/surprise-bonus-covid-19-vaccines-bolstering-cancer-treatment?utm_campaign=Science&utm_medium=ownedSocial&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwdGRjcANmg4xleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHllHmcn05h5oHcvTlVdqS547aO-xizwZ-fNG5lcX4l0UV3NzZo278ZOihR7V_aem_EH11LWpbMxj9HpPkjkkrNQ

10/06/2025