Wheels coming off the AGW bus
From Anthony at
Watts Up With That:
Briggs schools the �Bad Astronomer� on statistics
That letter signed by 16 scientists saying there�s �No Need to Panic About Global Warming� to the Wall Street Journal has caused a great disturbance in the farce. At last count there were no less than 19 blog rebuttals plus one new WSJ op ed piece trying to convince the alliance that all is well. It didn�t work.
But, they know the AGW Alliance Death Star has been compromised before its mission can be completed, the Rebellion has seen the plans and the Alliance knows it is only a matter of time before �the consensus� blows apart. Reports are that �Michael Mann has been tweeting furiously�, but the reinforcements he�s bringing in may not be able to stop the Rebellion as its ranks swell with ordinary people.
Here at WUWT, we had our best day ever on January 31st with 229,000 views from ordinary people, exceeding the heady days just after Climategate 1 and Copenhagen. People are coming in out of the cold to embrace the warmth and declare it good, while laughing at the folly of the alliance.
Meanwhile, the Bad Astronomer (Phil Plait er, not Jim Hansen) has been spinning in low orbit trying tell alliance forces that the past 10-15 years of stalled temperature rise are just a statistical illusion.
William Briggs, Statistician to the Stars, schools Plait on what statistics really is and writes:Remember when I said how you shouldn�t draw straight lines in time series and then speak of the line as if the line was the data itself? About how the starting point made a big difference in the slope of the line, and how not accounting for uncertainty in the starting date translates into over-certainty in the results?
If you can�t recall, refresh your memory: How To Cheat, Or Fool Yourself, With Time Series: Climate Example.
Well, not everybody read those warnings. As an example of somebody who didn�t do his homework, I give you Phil Plait, a fellow who prides himself on exposing bad astronomy and blogs at Discover magazine. Well, Phil, old boy, I am the Statistician to the Stars�get it? get it?1�and I�m here to set you right.
Much more at the site. Talk about cherry-picking.
Full post at William's site:
Bad Astronomer Does Bad Statistics: That Wall Street Journal Editorial
Posted by DaveH at February 1, 2012 3:21 PM