In college over three decades ago we used a terrific book in statistics called, “How to Lie with Statistics” by Darrell Huff. This has been more valuable to me in my post college education than any other book I can remember, and is still in print and available at Amazon.

One of the illustrated methods was to conduct hundreds of studies and only refer to the ones that reached the desired conclusions. Perhaps there were 100 groups testing toothpaste and one of the groups had a 60% reduction in cavities. The other groups had either an increase in cavities or no statistical variation. The other 99 groups are ignored and Madison Avenue births a successful toothpaste campaign.

With any sense of integrity this is a lie, both in intent and in effect. You would think our professional media would protect us against this but they are more often willing accomplices.

This same form of statistical lying is evident in the Global Dooming debate. Dissenting research and opinion is discarded and discredited. In American Thinker (see recommended sites) James Lewis writes:

Algorism means “I’m always right, no matter how the facts turn out.”

Global Dooming has a very simple explanation. There’s nothing new about it. It is just the human desire to create a millenarian narrative that fits our political biases, whipped on by the Politically Correct elites of this world, fed by a huge infusion of money into climate modeling and other dubious science, plus unprecedented media hype, and finally, the intimidation of thousands of rational skeptics.

This “madness of crowds” happens all the time. Charles MacKay wrote about it in 1841, in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Economics bubbles and busts are just one kind. But we can see a lush diversity of other superstitions and mass delusions.

It is a shame that it is now corrupting normal science. In healthy science the burden of proof is always on the proposer of any hypothesis. But now the burden of proof is on the skeptics in the case of human-caused global warming. But you can’t prove a negative. As soon as the skeptics disprove one false claim, the Global Fraudsters are allowed to jump to another one, as long as they predict the same conclusion.

In real science the deck is never stacked against the skeptics. Rational skeptics are welcomed when people know what they are talking about. They can only help to sharpen the issues.

So this is not a scientific debate any more. Like the real estate bubble, the sub-prime mortgage bubble, the Year 2000 bubble and all the rest, there are billions of dollars riding on the outcome of the Global Doom scenarios. That’s why all those expensive folks lived it up in Bali, with their private jets, luxury hotels, and massive carbon footprint.

for the complete entry: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/12/the_algorism_of_global_doom.html

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