Sunday, February 14, 2010

Little Green Footballs: Formerly Groundbreaking Blogue Now a Haven of Moonbattery

Charles Johnson did some epic work exposing the fraudulent Texas Air National Guard memos during the 2004 election. But since then, the poor guy caught a bad case of the Tetrox Trots and turned into a certified leftwing moonbat.

An example, from a recent post on LGF:

The Daily Mail’s story by David Rose, claiming that climate scientist Phil Jones “admitted” there has been no global warming since 1995, is completely false.
Journalism at its most irresponsible. There really ought to be a law. At least there ought to be consequences.
The BBC
interviews Phil Jones:
B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
The
Daily Mail headline:
Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995
Right.
but the text is more reasonable, if also, well, wrong:
He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.
He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.
As is common, the most egregious behavior is by the anonymous headline writer. The journalist, Jonathan Petre, can claim innocence, except for the peculiar use of the word “blip” showing a mind boggling lack of understanding of statistics for someone reporting on science, but at least an attempt at fairness.

The problem, Charlie, is that you're the one who does not understand statistics. If this 'trend' of 0.12c per decade (which is quite likely within the margin of error of the accuracy of the instruments being used) is not statistically significant, then THERE IS NO TREND.

These temperature readings are a sample. It is not possible to measure the temperature of the earth's atmosphere at every position in the atmosphere at every point in time from 1995 to 2010. Thus, our sample runs the risk of sampling error: The possibility that the sample is not representative of the overall temperature of the entire atmosphere. That is why we conduct a test for statistical significance. If the result is not statistically significant at at least 95% confidence, then there is a strong possibility of sampling error. And WE CANNOT MAKE ANY CONCLUSIONS FROM THE SAMPLE.

It is perfectly reasonable to say that there is no evidence of global warming since 1995.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You have to express more your opinion to attract more readers, because just a video or plain text without any personal approach is not that valuable. But it is just form my point of view