I’m going to talk statistics. My wife recently took an advanced statistics course as part of her Masters program, and we ended up talking about what she learned. A lot. In particular, we spent a lot of time talking about how people misunderstand statistics. Common examples:
- Statistics apply only to large numbers. If you don’t have a large enough data set, you can’t get anything meaningful out of the statistic. For instance, if I poll just ten people, I have too small a sample set to come to a decent conclusion.
- Statistics apply globally, not locally. For instance, a woman has an 13% chance of getting breast cancer if she lives to age 85. This doesn’t mean your five-year-old daughter has a 1 in 8 chance of having breast cancer right now. Take a group of people over the span of 85 years, and you end up with that stat.
- Drawing statistics from a small sample set, without looking at a similar larger sample set, leads to incorrect conclusion. If 97.7% of prison inmates eat meat, one might assume a correlation between eating meat and likelihood of becoming a prisoner until you measure the general population and find that 2.3% of the US population are vegetarians. The statistic has no particular meaning in a more limited context, it just reflects the similar statistic of the overall population.
- Correlation does not equal causation. Just because two statistics tend to have some sort of relationship to one another doesn’t mean one causes the other. It does mean, however, that there is some sort of relationship there which might be worth exploring.
- Discarding data that goes against your hypothesis. This is called “counting the hits and ignoring the misses”. For instance, people will often blame the weatherman for mis-calling a forecast, ignoring his 90% three-day-forecast success rate* the rest of the year. People remember the days he flubbed it, and forget the days things went as planned.
- Choosing one point in a data set. Psychics often point to a single or a few tests in an examination that support their claim to be psychics. Although those exceptional results are outliers on the bell curve of probability, since they were not repeatable, they are not exceptional in the overall arc of testing.
Now to my specific complaint:
If I hear one more person say “if scientists can’t even predict the weather, how can they predict global warming?”, I’m going to scream. Ongoing climate change, including the current upward temperature trend, isn’t a hypothesis based on weather forecasts!
The weather forecast in your home town is a teeny, tiny part of an enormous chaotic system. That chaotic system, however, is a self-contained ecosystem, and the overall ecosystem can be measured — and statistics drawn — many different ways to come up with accurate global statistics that have precisely jack to do with weather you should carry an umbrella tomorrow.
For more information on how people misunderstand and abuse statistics, read How to Lie With Statistics.
* Note: Of course, that success rate has its own sub-set of ranges of temperatures and weather conditions where it might be considered a hit or a miss. The forecast for the coming weekend is going to change a lot between Monday and Friday. However, three-day forecasts are currently pretty accurate most of the time, particularly if you look at aviation charts. The moral of the story: three-day forecasts are really useful to plan your weekend, and mostly accurate. Beyond that, anything can happen because it’s a chaotic system.
Guilty
I LOVE saying, “How can they predict global warming if they can’t predict the weather!
However, I understand that for 3-day predictions, their accuracy rate is respectable. I also know that it degrades quickly after 3 days.
Which leads me to my point that weatherpeoples are dealing with a small, small subset of the entire planetary ecosystem, and they can successfully predict only up to 3 days. How can they predict WHAT will happen in 100 years? They can measure the effects of what is happening, but as for predicting what changes will occur in the planetary ecosystem based on those observations?
Basically, we can say “temperatures hve risen 10 degress (or however much) over the oast 150 years.” But it’s beyond our abilities to say with any certainty, “These changes will cause X, Y, and Z to occur.” They’re just making guesses, because we don’t understand 10% of the total interactions that occur in the planetary ecosystem.
My $.02 Weed
I took “prob and stats” in
I took “prob and stats” in college. Great stuff. It makes it so easy to lie. The media abuses stats every day just to mislead and push their agenda.
Two things drive me nuts about what the media is doing with this whole “global warming” thing.
1) There is no proof that we’re causing it. Evidence, yes. Proof? No. Two major evidence items: a) increased CO2 emissions; and b) killing coral reefs. Coral reefs are the planet’s CO2 sponge. We’re killing them with pollution. Higher water temperatures are killing them, too, but good luck proving that’s our fault.
2) Why is nobody discussing the fact that Mars is experiencing temperature increases, too? That hit the news a while back. It was quickly hushed up because it didn’t fit the agenda. The Sun is playing a role here.
Earth has experienced wild climate changes in the past. Some of those wild climate changes enabled our civilization to begin. There will be more climate change on the earth. Get used to it.
Yes.. but…
Suppose you’re right. Suppose the lack of “proof” means we are not doing the “global warming thing”. Still.. there can be no doubt that we are using resources, exploding the population, and dumping sh*t into the air and water that is staying there. Whether it is having the exact effect being described, it is doing something.. and likely that something is bad.
But yeah.. assume you’re right, and its all a bunch of hoopla. But we go with their plan. There’s your worst case scenario. And we take expensive and drastic measures to stop it. What do we lose? Some money? Some work? Some lifestyle changes? And even if there isn’t a catastrophe to avoid.. surely the results will be better than what we’re doing now.
OK.. now assume not you, blogger, but the overwhelming majority of the scientific community are right. (def: “Scientific Community: (n) The really smart guys who spend their 9 to 5 thinking, reading and experiment with this stuff and clearly give it WAY more thought than we do”)
And lets assume in this instance, we say “its all hooey” and delay, as they are screaming at us not to do. and lets assume we continue to increase out emissions and pollution, and that climate change DOES occur as a result, and ice does melt and hurricanes do increase, and crops won’t grow in the same soil, and there’s a food shortage, and gas becomes unattainable, and small islands are engulfed, and well, you get it.
Lets assume, as before, we take THEIR worst case scenario. Whoops.. sorry earth.. we tried to burn some sh*t, and we cut down the nature parts, and we dumped TONS of carbon in the air, and now we can’t fix it because when there was still time, we preferred to argue that maybe, MAYBE, there was nothing to it.
Yeah.. that sounds fun.
Comparative worst case scenarios seem to say that we should, just in case, do something about this.
Consider this: In the 1800s, based on our knowledge of medicine, (and we thought we were pretty damned smart back then), we think to ourselves.. couldn’t they see the correlation between sterility of medical equipment and deaths because of sepsis during the civil war? Surely, someone must have thought: “Hey.. what if we start all washing our hands first and cleaning the supplies, more people will live. Dr. joe over there washes his hands a LOT and his patients die less often”
“No” Says the naysayer, “There’s no proof. We have nothing to suggest that there might be tiny little invisible things that soap can get rid of.”
“But Dr. joe’s Patients live more.. and he washes his….”
“Correlation is not Causation, son..”
And.. Scene.
NVZ: NINJAS VS ZOMBIES – THE MOVIE – http://www.nvzmovie.com THE OFFICIAL JUSTIN TIMPANE WEBSITE – http://www.timpane.com
I’m not suggesting we’re
I’m not suggesting we’re innocent. We’re definitely screwing up the planet. There are simply too many people on this planet. That’s the main problem.
I’m not suggesting we take no action to reduce CO2 emissions. We should definitely take action.
What I am saying: I’m sick of the way the media exerts control over the populace. Their place is to inform. Instead, they interpret and control.
PS: “The vast majority” of scientists do not support the “popular” media position on global warming. That’s a misconception. The media chooses to ignore the vast majority of scientists who view global warming as having multiple causes – those causes include CO2 and solar. CO2 has made it’s contribution, but it can’t compete with the sun’s impact.
Try this: google “mars global warming” and read what you will not see on major media reports.
cheers & peace
Do The Ends Justify The Means?
SO you’re saying it’s okay for the scientific community to mislead the public, bully its peers, and use scare tactics to get us to dump money into programs which may or may not make any difference?
Justin, we need to stop dumping sh*t into the water because it’s WRONG to dump sh*t into the water. We need to make cars which pollute less because it’s wrong to blow smog into the air and leak oil all over the planet.
We DO NOT need to do it because of some scare-tactic scientific claims which ultimately could debase the public’s trust in science if they turn out to not be true.
I can understand politicians using the media to mislead us to achieve their ends. I can understand big corporations and even religion doing the same. It leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, but that’s how things go these days.
But for science, the last bastion of level-headedness, fairness, and truth to do the same…I find that unconscionable.
You want me to help fix a problem, tell me the truth about the problem. Don’t create a boogeyman to scare me into helping. That’s just lying.
My $.02 Weed
The thing..
And here it is.. Maybe its not lying.
Some exaggeration, sure. But look at the data.. there is correlation between CO2 levels and warmer temps. There is an upward swing in temperature that is almost exactly on the curve (with some time displacement) of our industrialization. It MAY be true, these scary things they’re saying.
Maybe we SHOULD be scared.
And if not, but we are anyway.. then its kind of good, the ends.. So do they justify the means? Maybe, maybe not.
But what I get sick of is people going, “I don’t like the means, so lets not worry about the ends.” Thats suicidal.
NVZ: NINJAS VS ZOMBIES – THE MOVIE – http://www.nvzmovie.com THE OFFICIAL JUSTIN TIMPANE WEBSITE – http://www.timpane.com
Thing 2
It may not be lying, but it’s not nearly the gospel they want you to believe it is.
Justin, we should be scared because we’re driving cars based on internal combustion when much cleaner alternatives are available.
Justin, we should be scared because rivers that were clear 50 years ago are cloudy and polluted now.
Justin, we should be scared because China is entering into a highly industrialized state and they have 4 times as many people as we do, and they’re not worrying about cleaning the environment, they’re worrying about catching (and passing) us.
And let’s not forget how un-green the nuclear arsenals of the former USSR are, still pointed at us or being sold to the highest bidder.
We have enough to be scared about without science trying to forward an agenda that is based on claims that are not nearly as rock-solid as they are claimed to be.
How can it turn out well if we dump a lot of money and resources into something that might be based on junk science? Forget global warming…let’s clean the effing Chesapeake Bay. Let’s build an infrastructure for hybrid technology so we can have cleaner cars. Carbon footprint? What about the methane footprint?
Like I said, the science behind global warming is suspect, and that infuriates me much more than anywhere else, because science is supposed to be pure. If it falls into the same trap the media and politics and religion and everything else has, then we, as a society, are truly lost.
I’d rather not worry about global warming and concentrate on removing the junk in my water than dump a lot of money into something that we might have neither caused nor can control, and wasn’t as big a deal as was proclaimed. I’m not sold it’ll be that bad in 100 years. I AM sold my water is polluted. Fix that first.
My $.02 Weed
But..
Suspect or not.. What if you’re wrong.. what do we do?
NVZ: NINJAS VS ZOMBIES – THE MOVIE – http://www.nvzmovie.com THE OFFICIAL JUSTIN TIMPANE WEBSITE – http://www.timpane.com
What To Do
Who do we do?
We hit ’em up with some bogus statistics.
Fix The Known Problems
Why don’t we fix the problems we know for sure are happening now? Why not concentrate on the ones we have 100% verified exist?
Justin, I feel you’re missing the point. We’re pretty much saying to do the same things, except I’m saying we need to call the problem what it is, not make up boogeyman claims to scare people into action. When science uses politicking and the media to further its agenda, I cringe inside.
My $.02 Weed