@FollowTheCycles
My opinion is that Martin has great insights and experience, but that he’s prone - in his blog - to unjustified (not necessary wrong) statements of fact, and a degree of selection bias. This reminds me not to take too much as true, but as possibly true and think critically about it.
For example, on climate change, he doesn’t believe man has any influence on climate and says we’re headed into a mini ice age. He might be right…
But from time to time he makes statements based on news reports that either aren’t backed up by the report when I read it - in fact on reading to the final paragraph recently the report was actually supporting the opposite position.
Another example is him linking to a weather report for the UK and claiming it as evidence for the coming Ice age, when it was typical UK tabloid hyperbole creating a headline of a “cold freeze” for which there wasn’t any real cause - and certainly hasn’t happened. Things have got colder lately, but compared to a very mild period lasting two months, and even now that has ended, the weather is still milder than last year, and where I live we’ve only just had our first (very mild) frost. Last winter the canal froze solid in places during December. Nothing like that so far this winter.
But even if it was as he suggested, a cooler spell, this is not significant within the climate change debate. I’m sure he knows that, so I’m left wondering why does he do this.
These kinds of incident are quite frequent on that topic, but I also notice other claims that don’t add up when I think about them. For example, I’m still trying to figure out how he can suggest Pi is a factor in a cycle of Pi*1000 days. Why not Pi * 10 then? Or 100, or even Pi * 1234. Clearly this needs explaining, and I can’t think of a way to deal with that.
I’m not knocking him here, these are my observations, and I regard him as a source of high quality information and insight that I’ve not found anywhere else. He certainly gets me thinking in new ways, and that’s very valuable to me, because I share his passion for understanding what the underlying factors are that govern the human world, and I agree with him on many things.
I just think he rattles those blog posts out at a high rate, without necessarily reading or selecting his sources well enough, and also let’s his emotions push his opinions beyond what the evidence he’s presenting leads him to conclude.