"Figures Don't Lie, But Liars Figure"

I agree that most people who are suspicious of statistics don't understand them. I think it's human nature to be suspicious of something that you don't understand. They tried to teach us about that stuff at the paper mill, and the people generally resisted it, like they did with most of the stuff that came from management. I wasn't like that, you understand, it was all those other guys who had bad attitudes. I tried to make sense out of it, and I kind of did, but not enough to do anything useful with it. I might have had better luck if they hadn't written everything in Greek. Seriously, they use letters from the Greek alphabet to represent the unknown values, like we used to use letters from the regular alphabet in our math classes at Gage Park High. I know they are all just symbols, and it shouldn't really matter, but somehow it did.

I also agree with you about those studies, people tend to agree with the studies that validate their position and discount the studies that contradict their position. I think that's also human nature, but it might help if there weren't so many studies out there that contradict each other. If the studies were all done the same way, they should all come out the same way, but they don't. When two studies contradict each other, you can't believe both of them, so it makes sense to believe the one that reinforces what you already believe. That meteorology course I viewed talked about that some. When they are trying to predict the weather, there are always some variables that remain unknown so, what they don't know, they make up. They feed all this data into their computer, and it comes up with something they call a "model". To be fair about it, they run the data several times, keeping their known factors the same and changing their made up factors each time. Naturally, each model comes out a little different, so they look at all the models and see if they have anything in common. If they can find two or three models that come out close to each other, they give those models more credibility than the other ones. They still don't know for sure what the weather will be, but they try to map out the most likely scenario to put on the 6:00 o'clock news. What the chief meteorologist on one TV channel thinks is the most likely scenario might be different than what the chief meteorologist on another another channel thinks, and that's why the weather forecast is seldom exactly the same on all the channels. What a guy ought to do is write all this stuff down and see which channel gives the most accurate forecast most of the time, but I don't know anybody who does this.

I believe that the climate is changing on this planet, but the climate has always been changing on this planet. Like I said, most of the really big changes happened before humans were living on the Earth, so we can't be blamed for all of them. Maybe the current change is more dramatic than some of the others, but it would still have a long way to go to beat the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Even if it is our fault, what are they going to do about it? How are they going to "put a cap on carbon emissions"? All the plans I have read about involve raising taxes and/or raising the cost of energy. None of this is likely to reduce the emissions, just make them more expensive. What they need to do is find "clean" sources of energy that are cheaper than the "dirty" ones. We have talked about this before. If "the wind blows free" how come it costs more to generate electricity with a windmill than it does with coal or oil? Even if it costs more to install the windmill, it should soon pay for itself, since the actual power source is free.

The thing I read bout the Antarctic ice came from National Geographic. Some time ago, that magazine's editorial policy came down on the side of the global warming people, so when they report something to the contrary, I tend to give them some credibility. National Geographic is usually pretty fair about stuff like that. When they talk about something controversial, about half their readers who write in accuse them of being biased towards the one side, and the other half accuse them of being biased towards the other. That's about the closest thing to objectivity that you're likely to find nowadays.