Using Science against those that pervert it.

More on the deviousness of using Maths and Logic on Environmental issues.

James Hansen asserted that there is a 99% chance of four conditions being met.
Now the probability of each of the four conditions being true has to be greater than 99%
(For example the probability of Heads on a coin is 50% but the probability of Four Heads is greater than 50% In fact it's 0.50^4).

So look at this

It’s also important to distinguish the varying degrees of climate-change scepticism that exist. For example, someone might be sceptical about one or more of these commonly accepted statements:
1. Global warming is really happening.
2. Global warming is caused by man-made greenhouse gases (GHGs).
3. Global warming will be harmful.
4. GHG emissions must be reduced in order to combat global warming.

And if there really is an urgent need to reduce GHG emissions, all four of these statements must be true.
Predictably, James Hansen has no doubt: ‘I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99 per cent.

Follow the link to see what the actual numbers are.

You know... if a guy lies about basic, basic probability... why are we supposed to trust intricate and complex computer modeling?

Science can't always give us definite answers to our questions, even when the issues involved are very important to us. But it often can tell us how certain we should allow ourselves to be. And the certainty expressed by far too many environmentalists goes well beyond what the science will support.

That right there is the rub for me about a lot of the eco-people trying to use science to prove a certainty in things that we don't know


The standard deviation is not the same as the distribution of a set.

Unfortunately, journalists of both sexes tend to not be math geniuses. Few of them anywhere on the continent noticed that Ms. Hyde's data actually come a lot closer to supporting Mr. Summers' hypothesis than they do to refuting it.
...
And that's exactly what Ms. Hyde's team found: The test data for boys were spread out more in every state, and in every single grade, by between 11% and 21%. That may not sound like a big difference. But such differences can create tremendous disparities in the relative proportion of men and women meeting a certain criterion.

Which is to say, the Science study has produced a recognizable echo of what Mr. Summers pointed out, to such indignation, in 2005. It is hard to tell if intelligence follows a normally distributed statistical pattern at the very high end of cognitive achievement. But if so, that means male-female ratios will naturally grow even more dramatic as the cutoff is placed even higher — as is inevitably the case in elite quantitative professions.

If someone writing a story makes a basic goof on something simple about statistics, math, history, or logic...

Then what about the rest of their work? Where did their conclusions come from? A mind that may be over their head? Or are they being spoon-fed by someone else?

This is why being a skeptical reader/viewer is so important. It's more work, but isn't the truth preferable to what might be false?