The Brainiacs Strike Again

[Reidy]

May 24: Historically destructive hurricane season in 2024. 1 2 3 4. The reason (say 1, 3 and 4): global warming.

September 24: It didn't happen. The reason? Global warming.

[DavidOdden]

We have here a variant on the classic shell game fraud. I invite anyone with the patience to work through this fraud to spell out the details, as a public service. Let us start with the first report, issued 3 months ago. According to MSN, CBS reported that NOAA made a claim. Of course, NOAA is an inanimate organization which cannot speak, in reality some person (or persons) write a statement, some person or person possible different but all unidentified. Part of the purported claim is that

Human-caused climate change is warming our ocean globally and in the Atlantic basin, and melting ice on land, leading to sea level rise, which increases the risk of storm surge. Sea level rise represents a clear human influence on the damage potential from a given hurricane.

MSN leads with the claim that CBS has evidence that NOAA predicts an above average hurricane season. MSN alleges (via CBS, or the other way around) that NOAA predicts a 85% chance of an above-normal season, 10% chance of a near-normal season and a 5% chance of a below-normal season, and the forecasters are claimed to be 70% confident in these ranges. The inquiring reader should wonder WTF does it even mean to be 70% confident that there is an 85% chance of an above-normal season. The main point here is that nobody is actually taking responsibility for the claim.

More recently, we have another claim by MSN, that CNN (not CBS) made a claim about a statement by Phil Klotzbach, said to be a hurricane expert and research scientist at Colorado State University. I stipulate that such a person can reasonably be held to exist as a senior research scientist for the Department of Atmospheric Science at CSU. Supposedly, he said “If you had told me a month ago that nothing would (develop) after Ernesto I wouldn’t have believed you” although I wonder how he conveyed the parentheses in his statement (was it verbal or written?). Or did they rewrite his statement? Later on, MSN claims that CNN reports another out-of-context statement that “For the first time, we’re seeing that this is actually the case. We’re seeing it right now in the Atlantic hurricane season”, supposedly uttered by a person named Núñez Ocasio (I stipulate that there seems to exist a person by that name at Texas A&M). I do not see any evidence that any scientist has said anything of significance; I do see evidence that certain media have worked hard to give the appearance of substance.

The primary moral of the story is that one should not look to MSN, CNN, or CBS for any information on science and scientific questions. One should instead consult the peer reviewed scientific literature. In evaluating that literature, one should remember that scientific claims are scientifically contentious: that you can easily find contradictory conclusions. Why, exactly, are there such contradictions? Primarily because the underlying scientific models have not been sufficiently validated. Now, there are some areas where the models have been sufficiently validated, for example the Ideal Gas Law, the laws of thermodynamics, various laws of the physics of really tiny stuff, Ohm’s law and so on. There are no corresponding physical laws that allow us to confidently assert that human activity has caused an increase in planetary temperature. Indeed, we cannot even say what falsifiable claim is made under the rubric of “global warming”.

 

[Doug Morris]

23 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

The inquiring reader should wonder WTF does it even mean to be 70% confident that there is an 85% chance of an above-normal season.

I think the "70% confident" means that the other figures were arrived at with the help of statistical methods that give correct results 70% of the time.

 

[DavidOdden]

25 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:

I think the "70% confident" means that the other figures were arrived at with the help of statistical methods that give correct results 70% of the time.

 

The problem is that the other figures are the product of a statistical method that gives a correct result ("above-average") only 85% of the time. So the prediction of "above average" is true less than 60% of the time, i.e. slightly better than a coin toss.

[tadmjones]

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

[EC]

"Brainiacs" should be in scare quotes to ensure that the correct opposite meaning is correctly implied when false non-reality is implied.