House of Eratosthenes

Neal Boortz was on fire today with the globular wormening ManBearPig scam. A whole section devoted to it in his program notes, with nine links to good stuff in rapid succession, boom boom boom, and another link or two down below in the reading assignments.

Burn! But near as I can tell, he missed a good one. The Science of Gore’s Nobel: What if everyone believes in global warmism only because everyone believes in global warmism? by Wall Street Journal Editorial Board Member Holman Jenkins. This is one of the better ones because it deals not so much with politics or climate science, but with the way humans do their thinking…or, to be more precise about it, with the way the more careless humans are tempted to do what passes for thinking. In my mind, based on what I’ve seen for the last several years, this is precisely where the problem lies.

How this honor [Nobel Prize] has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on “availability bias,” roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind. Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: “Availability cascade” has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; “informational cascade” for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd’s beliefs; and “reputational cascade” for the rational incentive to do so.

Mr. Gore clearly understands the game he’s playing, judging by his resort to such nondispositive arguments as: “The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona.” Here’s exactly the problem that availability cascades pose: What if the heads being counted to certify an alleged “consensus” arrived at their positions by counting heads? [emphasis mine]

I find this “availability bias” to be an intriguing concept because of it’s immense size. It has great overlap with the bandwagon fallacy, but of course it would be an error to think of it as synonymous with that. It is more like a superset. That “everybody” imagines something to be true, is a powerful motive for an otherwise-independent thinker to decide for himself that the thing must be true — that would be a “bandwagon” effect. But with a bunch of other potential things, it would work by means of the availability bias. The ease of signing on to something, is confused with likelihood of validity or verity.

These “cascade” effects all have to do with bandwagon thinking, which concerns situations in which the availability bias is at work through the magic of crowds. This is precisely why, when your wife is serving on a jury you aren’t allowed to talk to her about it.

Interesting stuff. Kind of makes me think of some non-global-warming things…like the criticism I’ve received for my earlier post about why Rudy Giuliani is no longer electable in my opinion. Well, I shouldn’t say that; he may be nominated, and he may very well win. And I’d much rather see him as our 44th President than any of those silly donk candidates…or that nutcase Ron Paul. But not by much. I don’t have confidence in his ability to help the situation with any of the problems we face today.

This notion that Rudy’s judicial picks would be good ones, seems to me a good example of availability bias. Apart from the “R” in back of his name, I know of no firm evidence that this would be the case. His conservative credentials are supposed to be in good shape. I don’t think they are. And if they were, in this post-Reagan-O’Connor age, that really wouldn’t mean much.

Thompson’s the man. I don’t say this because I’m a time traveler from the future…and I admit, to offer hard proof, that is what I would have to be. Cynicism is a healthy thing for the conservative mind where court appointments are concerned. But Fred Thompson has directly addressed the issue of federalism — roughly speaking, it is the practice of making just as big a deal about who is to decide a certain thing, as how that issue is to be decided. Only one other candidate has taken this on, as sturdily as my guy Fred. That’s Ron Paul. Well, Fred Thompson isn’t crazy, so he has him beat there.

And getting back on-topic to the ManBearPig thing…Fred Thompson is so far the only candidate with the balls to laugh at it. That’s what we need. This is a serious, international issue. The whole notion that there might be a procedural discrepancy between what we’re supposed to call “science,” and this maneuvering by which global warming is having a heavier influence on our daily lives each year than in the year that came before…it’s losing currency very rapidly. The entire human race is evolving to slavery-status. We’re literally becoming a race born & bred to be told what to think, by people we don’t even know, and whose “heads being counted to certify an alleged ‘consensus’ arrived at their positions by counting heads.”

One way to combat this availability cascading, is to observe human behavior. If “climate change” is really a world-threatening crisis, do those who say it is one, behave as if they really think so? The answer on a day-to-day basis is typically a resounding “no,” but it is about to be moreso than usual now that we have our Bali conference complete with 10,000 participants swarming in by private jet.

“Nobody denies this is an important event, but huge numbers of people are going, and their emissions are probably going to be greater than a small African country,” said Chris Goodall, author of the book “How to Live a Low-Carbon Life.”

Interest in climate change is at an all-time high after former Vice President Al Gore and a team of U.N. scientists won the Nobel Peace Prize for highlighting the dangers of rising temperatures, melting polar ice, worsening droughts and floods, and lengthening heat waves.
:
The U.N. estimates 47,000 tons of carbon dioxide and other pollutants will be pumped into the atmosphere during the 12-day conference in Bali, mostly from plane flights but also from waste and electricity used by hotel air conditioners.

If correct, Goodall said, that is equivalent to what a Western city of 1.5 million people, such as Marseilles, France, would emit in a day.

But he believes the real figure will be twice that, more like 100,000 tons, close to what the African country of Chad churns out in a year.

It defies explanation, folks. It’s a parody come to life. “Carbon in the atmosphere! It’s going to kill us all! We’ve got to do something! I’m going to fly to Bali right now. You meet me there.”

One of Boortz’ links pushes this beyond the realm of hypocrisy, into a full-blown travesty. The global warming scam, by Derek Kelly, Ph.D.

…the greatest warming period was when dinosaurs walked the land (about 70 million to 130 million years ago). There was then five to 10 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is today, and the average temperature was 4-11 degrees Celsius warmer. Those conditions should have been very helpful to life, since they permitted those immense creatures to find an abundance of food and they survived.
:
The major “sin” for the global warmists is CO2. The Kyoto treaty is meant to reduce the amount of this gas so as, they say, to reduce the degree of warming and eventually return us to some stable climate system. If we look at the historical situation, however, this is cause for alarm. For one thing, there has never been a stable climate system. For another, the level of CO2 in our atmosphere is near its historic low. In the long run, the greatest danger is too little rather than too much CO2. There has been a long-term reduction of CO2 throughout the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth. If this tendency continues, eventually our planet may become as lifeless as Mars.

Count me every bit as jaundiced about the “planet dying from too little CO2” as I am about the Ragnarok that looms from having too much. In my mind, the important thing to be observed is the greater saturation of CO2 in the atmosphere 100 million years ago. It’s simply not a deadly gas. There were flora and fauna back then, there are today, they’ve been around every single day in between…just in different forms. Will a greater CO2 saturation make the planet uninhabitable for humans? Well, my math says 11 degrees Celsius is 19 degrees Fahrenheit.

I can deal with that. Oh yeah, I’m told a single degree or two doesn’t sound like much, but could be potentially devastating. So far, the only way anybody has substantiated that is with some gloomy scenarios about the ice shelf melting and the sea levels rising. This was been debunked years ago, and since then as well. Because of this and other inaccuracies, An Inconvenient Truth must be disclosed in the United Kingdom as a political work, not a scientific one, before it can be shown in the schools there.

In short — today really hasn’t been a very good one for the global warming swindle. I’m not sure into whose bowl of Wheaties the global warming gremlin pissed today. Or, maybe that 10,000 jet Bali conference finally got people all wised-up. Whatever the cause, if there’s been any sea level rise in anything, it’s been in the ocean of links to substantial bodies of work that either debunk it altogether, or expose it to serious, healthy skepticism.

My cautious optimism is beginning to “thaw out.” Perhaps people are starting to see the global-warming political movement — I say again, the POLITICAL MOVEMENT — for what it is: Just a bunch of anti-American, anti-capitalist anti-free-market bullshit.

I expect a different sort of cascade. It takes from 6 months to a year for these things to happen. When Gore, the UN, and the rest of the yokels satrted screaming “the debate is over the science says so,” that was a call to arms.

If anyone thinks there is a consensus among scientists, well they must not actually know any. At the symposia I attend, we still viciously argue about things that are 50 years old. Consensus my rosy rear end.

At any rate I expect many Journal articles to start coming out, that say “well maybe not so much…” sort of things. The political types made a serious mis-calculation when they hijacked science. Scientists don’t like that, in fact it pisses us off, because it belongs to humanity, not to a priveleged class, especially politicians.
- Allen L | 12/06/2007 @ 11:10
… the way the more careless humans are tempted to do what passes for thinking

this “Random Thought” from Thomas Sowell’s from a couple of days ago:

Now that the British television documentary, “The Great Global Warming Swindle” is available on DVD, will those schools that forced their students to watch Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” also show them the other side? Ask them.

Also ask a typical glowobul warmunning sheep how much of the atmosphere is made up of C02. I wonder how many know.

For the record, it looks like 150 years ago it was 0.00028, or 0.028%. Just under three one-hundredths of a percent. And it has “soared” up since then, to 0.00038, or 0.038% … just under four one hundredths of a percent. Not percent. That’s of a percent. Percent of a percent.

Yes, models say that this can make a bigger difference that what it sounds like it should. Models do. But data does not.

Model = Theory
Data = Fact

Much mirthful, self-congratulatory laughter is made in An Inconvenient ~~Truth~~ Myth when Bigfoot Al has to get on a lift to show you where CO2 levels are projected to go … “off the charts” if we don’t buy carbon credits and use compact flourescents. But it is instructive, I think, to remember that if his chart went from 0 to 100%, the wiggles in the line would be pretty much imperceptible.

It’s kind of like those horror movies where they zoom way in on a bug to make you think it’s huge and monstrous. What he did was zoom in scalewise to a chart that showed somewhere between 100 parts per million and 400 or 500 parts per million. Between 1 percent of one percent and 5percent of one percent.

Ha. This got longer than I expected. Don’t mind me, Morgan. Just stopped by to blather on your blog 😉
- philmon | 12/06/2007 @ 11:21
Allen,

You hit the nail right on the head with those last two sentences. This blog has a glossary that includes two entries for “science,” one classical, one modern. This was necessary, in an age in which we’re trying to “socialize” science. Meaning, redefine what it is and what is says, and verify the definitions with a social fabric rather than through intellectual, individually-verifiable methods and techniques.

I blame the common people. We’ve got egkspurts coming out of the woodwork now telling us about the “urgency” of this “crisis” — that’s the one thing that has been substantiated less than anything else! And nobody ever calls on them to substantiate it. You hear of this “point of no return” all day long and all month long. Well, that should mean there are options open to us, that we can verify are indeed open, that are about to close, and we can verify that they are indeed about to close. What are they? How do we know all this? I’ve been up to my eyeballs in articles, research papers, IPCC assessments, background-guitar feel-good movies dressed up as documentaries, just like everyone else. I’ve seen adorable penguins and confused looking polar bears — the “point of no return” is the one thing I have NOT seen. A quarter of a century ago when we talked about the hole in the ozone layer, our fluffy blow-dried morning news reports and glossy magazines at the haircut place, at least talked about THE DAMN HOLE. Couldn’t get away from it. But this point of no return, escapes all scrutiny, even light scrutiny designed for dissemination to the layman. It has achieved deity status quite unlike any level the poor little ozone hole even dreamed of ever approaching.
- mkfreeberg | 12/06/2007 @ 11:28
I really like the glossary, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the modern science definition. Recently, my girlfriend asked me what I thought about all this, so I came up with a silly yet instructive theory.

6 Billion Sweaty People

Since the primary greenhouse gas is water vapor what role does persperation play in global warming? When you plot number of people versus warming trend there is a good correlation since 1880. In fact at this rate all those sweaty people could warm us into extinction. Better do something now about all of them, before we reach the tipping point.

In seriousness, I took a page from Hilbert and set out only for an existence proof. I took the least controversial data set, the Vostok ice core data, and tried a few things. Didn’t work so well, in fact if you think about the temperature time data, that they constructed it was from deuterated water content in the ice. You quickly realize that they measured atmospheric water vapor content which they equated to warming.
- Allen L | 12/06/2007 @ 15:39
Just when the UN thinks it’s safe to come out with the big push, along comes a paper that offers definitive proof that CO2, man caused or otherwise, does not produce global warming. Yes, you read that right, does not, period, dot, end of subject.

It’s done with the magic of our newest latest satellites. If CO2 driven greenhouse was causing a greenhouse effect, if as the UN says this has already raised Earth’s temperature by 0.7 Degree C, then we should be able to measure that. It should be in the atmosphere. In this case, the signal we are interested in would be strongest in the tropics. And we can measure it, the satellite data was run through the analysis, and guess what? The unique signature of CO2 induced warming was not there. The satellite found nothing.

ICECAP links the paper and a summary pdf here.

Too bad the UN IPCC is closed to new research, you would think the UN would want the latest and greatest technology had to offer, unless of course, global warming is just a socialist hoax.

BTW, this satellite research is backed up with weather balloon data, there is a new paper either coming out or already published.

If the truth is out there, our satellites should be able to find it.

Enjoy …
- bill-tb | 12/06/2007 @ 22:51

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Thursday, December 6th, 2007