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Day: January 6, 2015

Warmists apoplectic as Brazil president names climate skeptic as science minister

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/01/warmists_apoplectic_as_brazil_president_names_climate_skeptic_as_science_minister_.html

Aldo Rebelo, Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation

Rebelo is clearly out of touch with modern science on climate change.

The new Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation Aldo Rebelo is a long-time Communist Party of Brazil congressman and vocal anti-environmental advocate, and the principal author of the divisive and controversial Forest Code revision.

Rebelo is also on the record rejecting climate science.

By “climate science” Schwartzman means computer models that have failed to predict the actual climate for over a decade and a half. Genuine science is all about skepticism and testing predictions with data.

Interestingly, old-line Communist Rebelo is on exactly the same page on climate science as the hardest of the hard-core tea partiers in the United States: it’s all speculation – “scientism” – not real science.

Here Schwartzman’s emotions get the better of him, and he reveals his true perspective. The phrase “hard-core tea partiers” is a tell – this is about expanding governmental powers, not about science or the environment. He can barely believe that a communist (who apparently should be an ally of a leftist group masquerading as environmentalists) could possibly be a true advocate of science, which is always skeptical.

I wonder what he does with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its 2,000+ climate scientists and experts, its ever-increasing certainty that climate change is mostly caused by human beings and will, if not urgently addressed, lead to catastrophic consequences? Or the clear evidence, rehashed at every climate conference for at least the last decade, that the poorest countries that have contributed the least to the problem are those that are already suffering the most drastic consequences in the form of sea level rise, floods and droughts?

Once again, the familiar refrain that since is a matter of majority vote or ”consensus.” That truly is “scientism.” As is the notion that science is science because some people yell louder (“ever-increasing certainty”) than others.

There has to be a backstory on the appointments. Maybe it has to do with securing a coalition. Or maybe it has to do with the realization that warmists will impoverish the world, something wealthy residents of Marin County, California can tolerate more than the poor of Brazil.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/01/warmists_apoplectic_as_brazil_president_names_climate_skeptic_as_science_minister_.html#ixzz3O6O40ni2
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Naomi Oreskes Plays Dumb On Statistics And Climate Change

Naomi Oreskes Plays Dumb On Statistics And Climate Change

http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=15179

Our heroine, thinking thoughts. Update Comments restored. No idea how they got turned off. Remember how I said, again and again—and again—that everybody gets statistics wrong? Here’s proof fresh from the newspaper “of record”, which saw fit to publish prominently an odd article by Naomi Oreskes, who wrote: Typically, scientists apply a 95 percent confidence limit, meaning that they will accept a causal claim only if they can show that the odds of the relationship’s occurring by chance are no more than one in 20. But it also means that if there’s more than even a scant 5 percent possibility that an event occurred by chance, scientists will reject the causal claim. It’s like not gambling in Las Vegas even though you had a nearly 95 percent chance of winning. This is false, but it’s false in a way everybody thinks is true. I hate harping (truly, I do), but “significance” is this. An ad hoc function of data and parameter inside a model produces a p-value less than the magic number. Change the function or the model and, for the same data, “significance” comes and goes. Far from being “scant”, that 1 in 20 is trivially “discovered” given the barest effort and creativity on the part of researchers. As regular readers know, time and again nonsensical results are claimed real based on 1 in 20. That’s the small error. The big one is where she says scientists “will accept a causal claim” when wee p-values are found. It isn’t Oreskes that’s wrong. Scientists will accept a causal claim in the presence of p-values. Problem is they should not. A wee p-value does not prove causality. A non-wee p-value does not—it absolutely DOES NOT—say that the results “occurred by chance”. No result in the history of the universe was caused by or occurred by chance. Chance or randomness are not causes. They are states of knowledge, not physical forces. If I thought it’d do any good, I’d scream those last four sentences. It won’t. You’re too far away. Do it for me. Oreskes goes on to discuss “Type 1″ and “Type 2″ errors (statistical terminology is usually dismal like this). “Type 1″ is the false positive, accepting that which is false as true. Sociologists, educationists, psychologists, any person with “studies” in their title, and similar folk know this one well. …

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