Moonbat Mathematics? They must have been using the
Posted on 10/15/2004 2:39:25 AM PDT by Goat Locker Freeper
Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries. But science also advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isn’t. <>
In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the “hockey stick,” .... This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago....
-SNIP-
But now a shock: independent Canadian scientists... have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.
But it wasn’t so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.
Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called “Monte Carlo” analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
-SNIP-
Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
Don't these upstarts realize it's not the nature of the evidence but the seriousness of the charge?
Pingareeno
You said it very well. When people want to find a particular result within random data, they will tend to do so.
Signed:
Dan Blather
I know a two things for certain: The Sun rises in the east and everything the left says is a lie.
Well done John....
Amen to that. Thanks John.
Thanks for posting this. Few things brighten my day more than running across something sure to frost the half-baked globull warmers.
That is being charitable. Occam's Razor requires the other obvious explanation to be true: the procedure was tailored to get the desired results. This would require great mathematics to hide the means so well for so long. Fraud, pure and simple.
For many years now, I have been trying to find a reasonable explanation for why "environmentalists" exist. Other than the simple pleasure of controlling other people's lives. I have yet to find one.
Saving the world is not an option. Delusion and ignorance on such a scale is simply too unreal to accept.
The global warming theroy is not a result of science, but a result of POLITICAL SCIENCE.
Nonsense!!! The sporty utility vehicle was, fortunately, there 20,000 years ago to pull us out of the ice-age. But, today we simply need to get rid of them because there over doing the warming effect now. We need to start building something today that will have the Left screaming of global cooling in the far future.
Love your Personal Philosophy, which appears to be less of a philosophy and more of factual reality, and applies whether data are or is. Global warming in the past was overcome in the single instant of the explosion of Krakatoa and other past vocanic activity which caused the loss of or severely limited the next growing season in much of the fertile regions of earth. People who postulate and pontificate about a global warming, have an agenda that does not include the success and well being of the inhabitants of the planet, IMHO.
In all fairness, that is not true of real science. A real scientist goes where the data takes him, no matter how silly the result. A real scientist knows when the results are silly and seeks the reason why and iterates, and tries again, or seeks alternative approaches to a solution.
Junk science, on the other hand, science with an agenda, is right up there with political chicanery, and worse than useless.
Always look for the spike in temperatures which occurred during the 1930s. If that spike is not shown, then something is wrong with the presentation.
Only if you're a limey.
GIGO
Excellent, and so true.
Might that be "Flight from Science and Reason"?
bump
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