A 485-million-year history of bad science

by W.  Essenbach,  June 27, 2025


A few days ago I published another analysis of mine, called pHony Alarmism. Take a moment to read that if you haven’t, because this is a sequel. Both are about a new study in Science Magazine yclept “A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature”, paywalled, of course.

A short digression. One of the ways I truly benefit from publishing the results of my scientific investigations on the web and interacting with the commenters is that my mistakes don’t last long. When I go off the rails, and notice I didn’t say “if” I go, my mistakes rarely last more than a day before they’re pointed out and I can consider and correct them.

But that’s only one of the ways that it’s beneficial to write for the web and then stick around. Perhaps more importantly, it lets people ask me interesting questions and point out overlooked avenues to investigate.

Here’s an example. In a reply to my post yesterday, I got this …

Jeff Alberts, June 25, 2025 4:26 pm

No graph with the co2 and pH together?

To which I answered …

They’re sampled at different times. I could interpolate both ways. Thought about it, then decided that was enough for one post. Hang on … we know pH is proportional in some sense to the log of the CO2. Give me a minute …

In a bit I came back to say:

…well, of course it takes more than a minute but most interesting.

Looks like that will be the subject of my next post. Stay tuned.

w.

This is that next post. End of digression.

One of the reasons that I didn’t look at graphing pH versus CO2 was that I was given to understand that the procedure for calculating the pH was very complex. The paper says (or at least the Supplementary Information (PDF) says, the paper is paywalled:

4.3 Estimating the temporal variability of pHsw [pH of saltwater]