FReepmail me to get on or off
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Now that we know for sure the original GW data was faked... looks like they will do or say almost anything to keep the lie alive.
Here be da situation:
A lie is the truth.
The truth is a lie.
If not clear on the concept, please send for my free booklet
“Saul Alinsky’s Pocketbook Rules”
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
Here’s an Yahoo/AP link to the article ( http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091027/ap_on_sc/us_sci_global_cooling ) where the global cooling book is disputed by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and statisticians. The basis of the dispute is the abuse of statistics by the author.
The UCS is correct, but in stating this, they have overlooked their own abuses of statistics and thereby mistakenly reveal their own, more insidious, hypocrisy.
The UCS points out the correct premise that you can get varying results by analyzing statistics depending on where you start. The situation they discuss is starting at a particular year and performing a 10 year temperature analysis. They complain that a 10 year analysis of temperatures that shows a decrease beginning w/1998 is being used as evidence of cooling, but, they counter, an increase is shown if you start in w/1997 and 1999.
Absolutely correct. You can indeed manipulate a 10 year analysis depending on what year you start.
Now, let’s take it one step further....
According to geologists, there have been 60 glaciations in the last 2 million years ( http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/when_ice_ages.html ). A glaciation is when polar ice sheets advance significantly. The last such glaciation was on the order of 10-15 thousand years ago (wooly mammoth time) and, on average, glaciations occur every 33,000 years (2 million / 60).
So, if you can manipulate 10 year analysis depending on what year you start, can’t you manipulate things the same way for a 33,000 year period, depending on what 3,300 year period you start?
The answer is indeed YES, so looking at temperatures from 1880 to present to forecast future disaster is absurd. A trend of heating or cooling within this short period indicates nothing beyond what may be a normal variation within the geologic scale at which the climate operates.
And, by the way, note that human industry and agriculture were not in existence for the first 59 of those glaciations. So how did that ice recede if no people were around to screw things up? The answer is that it depends on much larger factors than people trying to live.
Folks like the UCS are well aware of these things, but will only tell you what they want you to hear.
And the ice core samples, you ask? In spite of correlations between CO2 levels and warm periods, the warm periods themselves correlate quite well to orbital phenonemon like precession ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;317/5839/793 - you’ll have to dig further to get the full article).
The bottom line is that the climate varies quite well on its own, thank you, without regard to people. Using the last 150 years of temperature data to indicate a warming trend, correlating that to human industry, and concluding that people are warming the planet and need to be stopped, only indicate that propagandists like the UCS have no regard for humanity. Like pagans, they love the trees and animals but hate you.
And don’t you forget it!
We dropped 20 degrees yesterday and at that rate we will all freeze to death by the week!
“analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.”
All you need to know about this story.
Statistics, is by definition, the science of ignorance. We use statistics, or rather statistical technique to make decisions in absence of precise knowledge. For the most part, it works out beautifully.
Statisticians and statistics do not prove anything. The best they can do is evaluate the likely validity of a mathematical model. A simple example would be if you tossed a coin ten times in a row and got a run of ten straight heads. This does not “prove” that the coin is biased to produce heads, or that the next toss will be a head, though this is where the smart money might go. (Actually, the really smart money will wait on the sidelines, to see what the trick is.) The best that a statistician could say is that the observed outcome would occur only once in 1024 trials with “fair” coin.
What the article says is that statisticians cannot find a “significant” downward trend. But the generally accepted threshold for significance is 95% confidence level, which means that even if the data indicated that there was a 94.9% chance of a cooling trend, that would, by that measure, not be significant. The technique favors the “null hypothesis”.
ALL of our climate is just weather's normal ups and downs. Human beings have NOTHING to do with what the climate will be in any given year, decade or century.
Union of Concerned Scientists....enough said.
On Global temperatures, there’s lies, damn lies, and statistics, according to Mr. Twain, but snow fell last week, and I haven’t pulled my window-unit air conditioner up from basement storage for two summers in a row. So you tell me my part of the earth ain’t cooling, I’ll call you a fool.
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I can see how a greenhouse or a glass tank full of CO2 could be used to demonstrate heat retention.
At .034% concentration in the atmosphere, the CO2 molecules aren't close enough to even see each other...much less form a layer.
Steaming piles!
Well IIRC we haven’t had a single day of temps that have hit 100f in about 5 years.All years prior to that it would do that for at least a week each year. Last summer it never got to 90ºf even once.
