Random Thoughts About Global Warming

[€uroMeinke]

Originally Posted by flippyshark

D'oh, and I just bought beachfront property here!

The notion of island cities connected by elevated motorways seems very tomorrowland though

[Ghoulish Delight]

AP's review of emails.

The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

Would it have been better to print the entire raw data (again, going past the one-liner, that's exactly what his colleagues replied to him with)? Perhaps. But boy do I understand where the dude is coming from. When facing people who walk outside in January and say, "Look, it's 32 degrees today, take THAT global warming!!!" I can appreciate the urge to avoid printing a graph that might, to people who don't have a grasp of statistics, appear to show a downward trend in temperatures.

Sigh, sometimes I hate being right.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-10451428-256.html

This is why weaker-willed people have the urge to pretty-up the data. Even 100% conclusive data showing global warming WILL have bits that, read by someone who doesn't grasp the concept of statistical trends, "contradict" the conclusion. So it's tempting to look at it and say, "I know that the entire data set supports my conclusion, but people without the analytical training I have are going to misinterpret the full data set, so why don't I just tailor the data I publish so that to the untrained eye it matches the conclusion which I know to be right."

Again, it's a bad decision to make. The doffuses who succumbed to this temptation were correctly called out for it. But if you have to continually start each conversation by contradicting idiots that think a snow storm negates global warming, you'd start to really really wish the snow storms would stop.

[BarTopDancer]

They could just change the words "global warming" to "extreme climate change" and I bet the reactions would be different. Or if they did it from the start.

[Stan4dSteph]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

Sigh, sometimes I hate being right.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-10451428-256.html

This is why weaker-willed people have the urge to pretty-up the data. Even 100% conclusive data showing global warming WILL have bits that, read by someone who doesn't grasp the concept of statistical trends, "contradict" the conclusion. So it's tempting to look at it and say, "I know that the entire data set supports my conclusion, but people without the analytical training I have are going to misinterpret the full data set, so why don't I just tailor the data I publish so that to the untrained eye it matches the conclusion which I know to be right."

Again, it's a bad decision to make. The doffuses who succumbed to this temptation were correctly called out for it. But if you have to continually start each conversation by contradicting idiots that think a snow storm negates global warming, you'd start to really really wish the snow storms would stop.

What did you mean to link? That's the Google buzz article.

Daily Show and Colbert Report had some great segments on last night and ripped on the morons who see the current snowstorms as evidence against the warming trend.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Oops. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35343948...ew_york_times/

[alphabassettgrrl]

Some people don't grok the difference between climate (overall trends, a long-term thing) and weather (local, short-term, highly variable).

[SzczerbiakManiac]

I think The Daily Show deliciously illustrated this last night. Check out this clip, starting at the 4:45 minute mark. (The beginning part is funny too, but not directly related to this topic.)

[Ghoulish Delight]

Not that this kind of response will do any good, but glad to see someone trying to explain it to the nimrods:

http://rawstory.com/2010/02/dylan-ra...ls-glenn-beck/

[alphabassettgrrl]

Fantastic! Love it.