Who Needs Data?

The American Thinker ^ | December 18, 2009 | Randall Hoven

[Scanian]

The scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU), and the people who funded them, did not know how utterly useless CRU was. All the research done at CRU made no difference whatsoever to the "science" of global warming. Just ask other scientists and global warming alarmists. Heck, ask CRU.

You think CRU was the only source of raw thermometer data going back 150 years? Nope there are two others. So who cares if CRU "lost" theirs?

You think CRU did science that showed warming trends? So what? Their conclusions were the same as everyone else's. Phil Jones, head of CRU, said that

[Telepathic Intruder]

The ability of data to fit the pre-determined conclusion is the only factor needed in determining its validity.

[muir_redwoods]

"You think CRU did science that showed warming trends? So what? Their conclusions were the same as everyone else's."

So, the chances that CRU's approach to critics and data integrity was also the same as everyone else's is pretty good, right?

[taxcontrol]

Excellent article with regards to the addressing of probability and cost response to probabilities. However, allow me to put this into a smaller more local package.

Let us suppose that you were the owner of a company that made $10 Million per year. Then lets assume you were planning to take action (risk mitigation) against an event .... any event that would cause your business to stop functioning. 100% failure type of event.

How much would you be willing to spend on mitigation efforts?

Suppose you lived on a 100 year flood plain. Such a flood could be reasonably construed to wipe out your business. Same with Tornadoes, Hurricanes, etc. So for the sake of argument, you go through the historical data and come to the belief that in any given year, there is a 2% chance that such an event would happen (highly improbable).

If you were then to spend MORE than 2% of your total company value of $10 million, you would be wasting money because the chance of an event is less. It only makes sense to spend something less than 2% per year or less than $200,000 per year.

Now how much would you spend on an event that did not wipe you out? If it only damaged your revenue (GDP), then you would only want to spend enough money to mitigate the occurrence of that event down to an acceptable probability. For example, installing $25,000 worth of generation equipment would protect my business in the event of power failure. Power failure can likely happen with flood, tornado, hurricane, ice store, etc. So with one action, I have mitigated multiple possibilities. That would be a better spending of money than say installing $25,000 of berms to protect against flooding.

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !