Did I See this Item in a New York Times Headline?

"Summer Arctic Ice Measurement Grows" would have avoided the double negative.

Here we go again. Does anyone on either side of this debate understand statistics; i.e. the difference between a fluctuation and a trend? I am not arguing for or against global warming, but I am arguing for the proper use of statistics - by both sides! ARGHHH!

Oh, come on! Does anyone take those alarmists seriously anymore?

Global warming is also responsible for the credit crunch and Britney Spears' problems with cheetos and booze. It's even responsible for global cooling.

Warren Meyer (of Coyote Blog) has some interesting analysis of the impact of Arctic ice shrinkage, especially in comparison to Antarctic ice growth.

http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2007/09/chapter-7-skept.html#_Toc171216611

The same point has been made in a recent review of Friedman's "Hot, Flat and Crowded" by Bjorn Lomborg on WSJ. I think that Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus is a good initiative and, since there are disagreements, the most reputed climatologists and economists of a different persuasion should be brought in (but no Quiggins or post-autistic economists, please) to allay any objections about partisanship.

I have a question for Don. I think that the problem is best analyzed from a cost-benefit analysis viewpoint. Does he agree? I am asking because his colleague and intellectual mentor J Buchanan is against this approach.

Come on guys, the government is in a time of massive bailouts. The temperature has to be cooling off now in order for more money to go that cause!!

Taleb:

Are we using models of uncertainty to produce certainties?

This masquerade does not seem to come from statisticians—but from the commoditized, "me-too" users of the products. Professional statisticians can be remarkably introspective and self-critical. Recently, the American Statistical Association had a special panel session on the "black swan" concept at the annual Joint Statistical Meeting in Denver last August. They insistently made a distinction between the "statisticians" (those who deal with the subject itself and design the tools and methods) and those in other fields who pick up statistical tools from textbooks without really understanding them. For them it is a problem with statistical education and half-baked expertise.

Jay: That is a very good point, and a somewhat surprisingly common issue in many fields of study. Not just with statistics, but rather the borrowing of concepts and ideas from other fields and applying them without understanding them is common across all fields it seems.

I just got done spending a weekend with a buddy of mine who is a PhD candidate in English analytics (or something along those lines.) We spent a good bit of time talking about how his professors use economic ideas to define models for the exchange of ideas, using Marx as a base. Needless to say, the economics part of their theories was WAY off base, though I can't speak to the rest.


Amusingly, I am reading Origins of Wealth which describes as the first part how economists borrowed a lot of ideas from physics to come up with the supply/demand model of equilibrium, but did so at a time just before entropy was well understood. The result was that economics labored under a really awkward and inaccurate model set for a long time, as dynamic systems were outside their reach.

I suppose the take home message here is "don't try and wing it yourself; actually get a professional in the field you are working in to help your project." One would think that with all the different proffessors at universities this wouldn't be an issue...