Posted on 03/30/2015 12:51:30 PM PDT by Phillyred
Sen. Ted Cruz cited a 1975 Newsweek article on “global cooling” to question the evidence of global warming, and in the process made several incorrect and unsubstantiated claims.
The Newsweek story, which did warn of a “cooling world,” has been criticized and largely debunked — by its own author. Cruz’s claim that “advocates of global cooling suddenly shifted to global warming” ignores the fact that there was no scientific consensus in the 1970s about global cooling. Cruz said that “satellite data demonstrate that there has been no significant warming whatsoever for 17 years.” This is misleading. Though the trend line in recent years has been relatively flat, Cruz cherry-picks a particularly warm year (1998) to deny the clear longer-term warming trend. There have now been 360 consecutive months when the global temperature was above the 20th century average. Cruz compared “global warming alarmists” to “flat-Earthers” and himself to Galileo, saying “this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier” for insisting the Earth was round. This is wrong. Galileo’s troubles with the church stemmed from his belief that the Earth orbits the Sun. The fact that the planet is round was accepted before Galileo was born. In an interview with the Texas Tribune (at the 14:24 mark), Cruz, who recently announced his candidacy for president, told reporter Jay Root that the 1975 global cooling story in Newsweek is evidence that “alarmists” simply want the government to control the energy sector.
Cruz, March 24: I read this morning a Newsweek article from the 1970s talking about global cooling. And it
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
When did science become a democracy?
Consensus has not and has never been evidence.
I could prove there is no such thing as global warming. Take away all the grant money.
Ha!
I vote they have to report from atop the Leaning Tower of Pisa...after we remove a few keystones.
ignores the fact that there was no scientific consensus in the 1970s about global cooling.
Sure put it was substantially the same people.
Being "above the average" doesn't mean anything, because just like you accused Cruz of cherry-picking, you can cherry-pick the time window for calculating an average. If you were to start with temperatures back when Greenland was actually green, where would we be now in comparison to the average?
The other problem is the accuracy of the data used to compute the "20th century average" is suspect. It's subject to measurement errors and even siting errors. The satellite data provided our first opportunity to accurately measure it, free of siting bias. Not concidentally, that was when the temperature record leveled out.
The real question is: what's the trend? Is it up, or is it down? It's currently flat, contrary to nearly all of the models that predicted a significant rise under the current conditions. When climate researchers admit this and modify their models to account for it, then I might be interested in the results.
BTW, the infamous "hockey stick" model was a classic example of how models take on a life of their own. A skeptical engineer tweaked the input data to see how the model responded. He found that no matter how he changed the data, it always generated the "hockey stick". He even fed it random data, and got the "hockey stick".
This should have been enough reason for the entire scientific community to discard the model, and regard the author as incompetent (at best) or a fraud.
There is nothing else in reality other than Christianity and Humanism.
The latter began with the lie “you will be as gods”.
All else, including “liberalism”, follows.
An oxymoron they’re too stupid to recognize...
You would think that someone writing about science would use mean or median 20th century temperature.
Ummm, "mean" and "average" are the same thing. :-)
But, otherwise I agree with you -- I just posted something similar.
But on another note I suppose he would want to totally ignore 18th century which quite cold.
Using the 18th century data (assuming we could get accurate data) would lower both the mean and the median. But, if you were to go all the way back to when Greenland was green (and the climate was much warmer), that might raise them.
360 months = 30 years. 1200 months = 100 years = 20th century.
Half of the 20th century temps were above average. Half were below average. That's what "average" means.
I think we can figure out the relative significance of this.
Haha... no consensus...haha in 1970s....haha. ... in 50 years when this global warming crap is discredited, they will be saying there was no consensus over that in 2000. It really is fish in a barrell, but the left still controls the narrative.
No, that's a median.
Here's an example using this series of numbers: 1,2,3,4,5,100,101.
The median is 4.
The mean/average is the sum (216) divided by 7 = 30.86.
How is that "cherry picking"?
Cruz said there is no warming for the last 17 years and then he specifically points to those 17 years in the data.
Dictionary.com (LINK) defines "mean" as an average, and then says, "Two other common forms of averages are the median and mode."
Though a lot of people do use "average" to mean "arithmetic mean" only.
Exactly! Think of how many government grants were produced as a result of the “hockey stick” graph — fraudulently produced from manufactured data. Had there been no fraudulent dramatic upswing in temperatures, there would have been no need for more research.
As a colloquial word, average has been overloaded to mean a lot of things. In the scientific, statistical, and mathematical world, it's the arithmetic mean.
Even your own citation says that "average is a synonym for arithmetic mean".
Actually, see my earlier posting. The hockey-stick graph was produced with an incorrect or fraudulent model.
It didn't matter what data you put into it: it still generated a hockey stick. Even random data generated that result.
Average Great! But really it's just Median. :oP
My question that usually stumps these idiots is “what’s normal?”
Of course, most of these morons don’t even understand Earth’s orbit, sun spot activity, etc.
I remember in the 5th grade the “scientific consensus” was that Pluto was a plant. How did that work out? lol
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