Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.
Albert Einstein
Tweet of the Day
The debate is over: fascists are lousy statisticians, e.g., the 77-cent feminists and the 97% climate scientists. http://t.co/bzDyE0lfYd
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) October 10, 2015
Image of the Day
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| Via Libertarian Catholic |
Prohibitions Against Markets of Voluntary Exchanges Ultimately Fail
Marketing Liberty to a New Generation
A few weeks back I embedded the videos in a post. The videos are available here.
Is the Debate Over? Disingenuous Statistics
Mark Steyn skewers one possible source of the often cited 97% figure, basically an unscientific, poorly standardized poll. (For a more comprehensive critique of the 97% figure, see Tuttle's National Review post here.) Another prominent study is described here:
One of the main papers behind the 97 percent claim is authored by John Cook, who runs the popular website SkepticalScience.com, a virtual encyclopedia of arguments trying to defend predictions of catastrophic climate change from all challenges.I won't review Epstein's review here in detail, other to explain that Cook uses a Procrustean methodology with data that doesn't really conclude what Cook claims. He looks at a survey of papers, and there's an argument over which papers were chosen, the unit of analysis (papers. vs authors: some authors were represented multiple times, and there's also a question of arbitrary selection, e.g., one professor pointed out less than 10% of his papers on the topic were selected, and half of those were incorrectly categorized), and his classification was based on subjective inferences, many of which are rejected by the original authors themselves. Most of the papers that Cook cites at most acknowledge human emissions may be some unquantified factor in global warming but not necessarily as or more significant than natural factors. Epstein notes that when Friedman challenged the figure, someone calculated that percentage of papers which explicitly claimed "the main cause" was more like 1.6%. And we aren't even factor how pseudo-intellectuals like Barack Obama take these dubious studies, which would never make it out of Doctoral Research 101, and generalize them from climate scientists to scientists as a whole.
Here is Cook’s summary of his paper: “Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97 percent [of papers he surveyed] endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.”
Choose Life: Babies React to Dad Coming Home
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Chip Bok via Reason |
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| Courtesy of Steve Kelley via Townhall |
Roberta Flack, "If Ever I See You Again"
