<p>Catahoula-</p>
<p>Not only are you unlikely to be able to decipher the statistical hoopla, as you call it, you obviously also get your information from right wing blog sites and Fox News, and here is why.</p>
<p>1) You refer to “climategate”, which was the cause celebre among the denier crowd. Basically through whatever means they got a hold of e-mails and memos that seemed to suggest that climatologists who supported global warming were actively colluding to cook the books and so forth, it was all the rage.</p>
<p>The only problem is, government agencies in both the US and Great Britain (and this was with governments not exactly pro global warming, in the US this happened under GWB) examined this, as did science organizations and the like, and they all came to the conclusion that no such conspiracy had taken place. What they did find was some researchers venting and saying things like “gee, maybe it would be easier to falsify data rather then do the hard work of convincing people”, while stupid it was not some sort of ‘smoking gun’.</p>
<p>2)The famous “hockey Stick” graph has been gone over more times then a dogs bowl you put prime rib in. Congress back in the bush days when the GOP controlled both houses, had independant investigators look into the hockey stick graph, and when they reported back to congress (to the displeasure of Inhofe, chief global warming denier and proponent of the good ole boy oil and gas industry, gee I wonder why…) was that the methodology that was used to draw the graph, the statistical methods, were valid. They did have some feedback on some of the data, not that it was wrong, but slight changes based on some statitistical error and such, but the overall conclusion was that the ‘hockey stick’ graph was in fact sound in its basis. In fact, the authors of said graph/study took into the suggestions of the panel and revised their graphs, agreeing to the points they made, but it didn’t change the overall conclusion.</p>
<p>3)Deniers also love to promote the idea that 'scientists don’t agree", or sneer at “models”, but what they leave out is that what scientists are disagreeing about most of the time is how to read the models, which is not surprising, because models don’t prove anything, they are what they are, conceptual models that may or may not be close to what really happens. </p>
<p>It is funny, because many of the same denier types who will tell you "models are bogus’ use models to prove something they believe in. The most classic case of that is the so called “laffer curve”, which is based on an economic model that conservatives have been basing their ideology on for years, that tax cuts stimulate the economy in such a way that they end up ‘paying for themselves’ (in other words, cut 100 billion in taxes, and the economy will increase in such a way that they government will see tax revenue return to or exceed that 100 billion, based on stimulated economic activity). Economic Models are no more or less valid then scientific ones, they are based on models that use all kinds of assumptions that may or may not be true…</p>
<p>And where scientists do disagree is on things like how fast the changes will happen, what kind of impact they have and more importantly, can we in fact do anything about it? Scientific consensus isn’t like fundamentalist christianity, that has boiled down belief to literal reading of words on a page, it means that the scientists agree to something in broad principle but don’t necessarily agree on the details.</p>
<p>4)And most of the statistical hoopla and so forth has come from the deniers. For example, I routinely hear how this warming we are seeing is caused by solar radiation (a principle that no scientist would argue, increased radiation does increase planetary warming). And some data put forward by skeptics reputedly showed measurements of solar radiation that ‘proved’ it was responsible. </p>
<p>Only problem is when put through the wringer when making conclusions, it turns out the data was improperly smoothed, used readings from a narrow source of recording stations, and didn’t factor in a number of other reasons why the readings would be off. And more importantly, when the data they presented was compared against readings from observatories in orbit and from all over the earth, the numbers didn’t tally…</p>
<p>A couple of years ago deniers floated this data that supposedly showed the earth was ‘cooling down’, they showed readings from the atmosphere from drones and balloons that showed cooler then normal temperatures…until someone looked into it, turns out that the information had been improperly gathered, the balloons and drones were at a higher altitude in the atmosphere then the report claimed (measuring temperatures at 20,000 feet versus 10,000 feet are always going to be colder). They were comparing data from higher altitudes with norms measured in earlier years at lower altitudes, and saying ‘gee, it is colder’ (and when they took into account the altitude, the figures showed warmer temps, as predicted)</p>
<p>5)Likewise, one of the most telling data points for me about global warming is that deep water ocean temps are rising, and rapidly. Shallow water measurements fluctuate, but deep water temps take major changes in atmospheric temperature to percolate down and affect them, yet measurments are showing this. Once again, deniers came up with data that showed deep water temps were dropping, ‘disproving’ warming…and once again, when the data was checked and the methodology verified, guess what? “Oops, the thing holding the sensors was sitting way deeper then the initial reports claimed”…want to guess if that was an accident or not?</p>
<p>What I find hysterical is when I hear people like Perry, Bachman and Palin claiming global warming is a hoax, that the ‘science’ is cooked…you are talking about Perry, who got D’s and F’s in any science course he took, Bachman who is likewise challenged, and Palin, who had to go to 5 different colleges to find one where she could actually get a degree in some jerkwater field of study and not a science class to her name…and they are fit to judge? More importantly, all three think evolution is fake and that the earth is 6000 years old, and we let that type judge science? It is no surprise that a significant percentage of those who believe warming is a hoax are also fundamentalist Christians, it takes the same kind of attitude towards science to dismiss science and scientific method in the face of the kind of evidence that is out there.</p>