The Global Warming Religion - A Modern Day Crusade: Do You select The Cause or Does the Cause Select You?

by ilene - November 23rd, 2009 2:15 pm

This is another must-read post by Mish on science vs. propaganda. Unfortunately it seems that propaganda trumps science, at least long enough to cause immense damage. - Ilene

The Global Warming Religion - A Modern Day Crusade: Do You select The Cause or Does the Cause Select You?

Courtesy of Mish

Tags: Al Gore, Cap and Trade, Crusade, Global warming, Global Warming Religion, interview with Dr. Tim Ball, Propaganda, scam, science, Watts Up With That?

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Climate-gate!

by ilene - November 21st, 2009 4:39 pm

Here’s more on the climategate story, from a few different perspectives. - Ilene

Climate-gate!

By Andrew Leonard at Salon

The climate-change obsessed blogosphere — including both those who accept the science behind anthropogenic climate change and those who deny it — is in an absolute uproar today after the revelation that an unknown party hacked into the computer system of an important climate research center and posted hundreds of private e-mails to a Russian FTP server.

To climate skeptics, the e-mails prove that global warming is a conspiracy theory. At Wonk Room, Brad Johnson rounded up the politicized reaction:

• If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW," says the Telegraph’s James Delingpole.
• Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey claims the emails discuss "repetitive, false data of higher temperatures."
• The National Review’s Chris Horner salivates, "The blue-dress moment may have arrived."
• "The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century," blares Michelle Malkin.
• The Australia Herald-Sun’s Andrew Bolt claims the emails are "proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in modern [sic] science."

RealClimate, a blog maintained by real climate scientists, is busy doing damage control. This story will no doubt rage for weeks, so I’m just going to pick one example of the back and forth before trying to take some time to go deeper, if merited…

So what’s going on here? Put aside the question of whether the words "trick" or "hide" have nefarious or innocuous meanings. The scientific problem is that in attempting to reconstruct temperatures in the past, climate scientists are often faced with the problem that there were no humans standing around holding thermometers and writing down temperatures. So scientists use "proxies" — tree rings, or ice cores, or fossilized clams, or lake pollen trapped in sediment…

Overall, the more data we have, the more clear it has become to the vast majority of scientists working in this field that the earth has gotten significantly hotter at an alarming rate in the last century, most likely due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And if there really is a smoking gun in the hacked e-mails that convicts scientists of fraudulent behavior or faking data, well, let’s hear it…

See Also:

Hackers steal electronic data from top climate research center

By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post

Scientists’…

Tags: 'Anthropogenic Global Warming', climate-gate, emails, Global warming, Hadley CRU files, realclimate, Scandals, science

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Double-Edged Sword: Swine Flu and Vaccines

by ilene - November 6th, 2009 1:26 am

By guest author Terry Doherty and Ilene, your editor

Terry Doherty is the Research Program Coordinator in the Depts of Biomedical Sciences and Academic Affairs at Cedar Sinai in Los Angeles, California.

Double-Edged Sword: Swine Flu and Vaccines

There’s plenty that is unknown about the swine flu and the swine flu vaccine.  If searches on the internet are any indication, deciding whether or not to be vaccinated may be a tough, emotionally charged decision for many people.  So how - without having the background to write a swine flu grant proposal, conduct the research, and get the thing published in the New England Journal of Medicine - do we decide whether or not to get a swine flu shot?  

One way is to attempt to evaluate and weigh the risks of the vaccine against the risks of the flu.  That is how I approach the subject, but it’s easier said than done.  As is often the case with medical interventions, the risks are not fully known. And even if we could carefully assess the risks, our underlying assumptions may be wrong.  Percent risks are averages collected by studying large populations.  We may not be one of the statistical average.  Then there are the gaps in the available data, and own biases and belief systems.  Our view of the world affects our analysis and often we are not even aware of how large of an effect those biases may play.   

In Vaccine War: Autism, Flu and Science, TIME, Maia Szalavitz discusses how emotion and biases play a large part in our risk-benefit assessments:

Just in time for the national roll-out of the new H1N1 flu vaccine, Wired Magazine and the Atlantic have weighed in on the ongoing vaccine war: Wired has a profile of Paul Offit, a vaccine researcher and pediatrician who has consistently spoken out in favor of vaccination and pointed to the lack of evidence linking vaccines and autism; the Atlantic checks in with a piece questioning the science suggesting that flu vaccines and antiviral drugs prevent people from dying.

Both articles have elicited heated debate all over the Web: Amy Wallace, who wrote Wired’s piece, excerpted below, has received vitriolic criticism and attacks from vaccine opponents, setting records for page views…

This debate over vaccination doesn’t seem likely to end any time soon. For critics, vaccines have become a touchstone for cultural anxieties and a not entirely unjustified mistrust of government and big business. No matter what evidence researchers provide supporting the safety of vaccination and its clear benefit to global public health, opponents…

Tags: death rate, Does the Vaccine Matter?, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, incidence, Jon Stewart, Lancet, risks, science, seasonal flu, should I get the swine flu vaccine?, side effects, swine flu, vaccines

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Vaccine War: Autism, Flu and Science

by ilene - October 29th, 2009 3:06 pm

Vaccines: where does science end and profit motive begin? Maia Szalavitz argues, and I agree, that these are scientific questions and we need to conduct scientific research - not rely on preconceived views—to answer the questions. - Ilene

Vaccine War: Autism, Flu and Science

By Maia Szalavitz, Courtesy of TIME

Just in time for the national roll-out of the new H1N1 flu vaccine, Wired Magazine and the Atlantic have weighed in on the ongoing vaccine war: Wired has a profile of Paul Offit, a vaccine researcher and pediatrician who has consistently spoken out in favor of vaccination and pointed to the lack of evidence linking vaccines and autism; the Atlantic checks in with a piece questioning the science suggesting that flu vaccines and antiviral drugs prevent people from dying.

Both articles have elicited heated debate all over the Web: Amy Wallace, who wrote Wired’s piece, excerpted below, has received vitriolic criticism and attacks from vaccine opponents, setting records for page views.

Describing death threats and attacks on Offit, Wallace writes:

So what has this award-winning 58-year-old scientist done to elicit such venom? He boldly states — in speeches, in journal articles, and in his 2008 book Autism’s False Prophets — that vaccines do not cause autism or autoimmune disease or any of the other chronic conditions that have been blamed on them. He supports this assertion with meticulous evidence. And he calls to account those who promote bogus treatments for autism — treatments that he says not only don’t work but often cause harm.

While the Wired article has been attacked by advocates, the Atlantic’s article has been slammed by several blogs written by scientists. The authors, Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer, reply to their critics here (scroll down). The scientists take issue with their argument that the scientific evidence does not support the use of the flu vaccine and antiviral medications like Tamiflu, detailed below

Brownlee and Lenzer ask:

… what if everything we think we know about fighting influenza is wrong? What if flu vaccines do not protect people from dying—particularly the elderly, who account for 90 percent of deaths from seasonal flu? And what if the expensive antiviral drugs that the government has stockpiled over the past few years also have little, if any, power to reduce the number of people who die or are hospitalized? The U.S. government—with the support of leaders in the public-health and medical communities—has put its faith in the power of vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread and lethality…

Tags: Amy Wallace, Autism, controversy, flu, H1N1, Paul Offit, science, swine flu, thimerosal, Vaccination

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Science, Stocks and Superstition

by ilene - August 31st, 2009 10:55 pm

Science, Stocks and Superstition

Courtesy of Tim at The Psy-Fi Blog

Unreliable Science

As we’ve seen – repeatedly – people aren’t particularly good at overcoming the behavioural biases built into our nature by evolution. There’s no real reason we should be – computing the statistical probability of an above average return on the stockmarket over a twenty year period wasn’t of much value for most of human history. This was partly because twenty years was more than the average lifespan of a proto-human but largely because no one had yet got around to inventing money or stockmarkets or stocks. Or ‘years’.

If these biases are inherent and cause us to do stupid things around finance we might expect that they’ll appear in other areas as well where humanity has only recently started to apply its higher cognitive functions. So it’s unsurprising that our basic intuitions about science are about as reliable as those we have about finance. To whit: not reliable at all.

Greek Geeks

Science has been around a lot longer than modern financial theory. The Ancient Greeks developed many concepts that aren’t out of place in the modern pantheon of university science faculties – atomic theory, planetary orbits and toga parties amongst them. Unfortunately they failed to marry their scientific insights to a stable economic system and much of their knowledge was lost for the best part of a millennium. The lesson being, presumably, that disenfranchising women and relying on slave labour is a poor way of building a stable society. Global corporations take note.

During that lost thousand years or so the only real legacy of Greek knowledge in the Western world was a smattering of Aristotle, who was a bloody good thinker but a bit weak on stuff like planetary motion and mathematics. Somewhere along the line Aristotle’s ideas got mixed up with Christianity and resulted in the odd position of the Catholic Church defining God’s word on the basis of the scientific writings of an atheistic Greek who died before Christ was born. We can blame Thomas Aquinas for that one.

The period known as the Renaissance – the rebirth – was marked by a remarkable rediscovery of Ancient Greek thought. Some of this came from the Muslim world, where many ideas and writings had been sustained through the European Dark Ages, and some of it from the libraries of monasteries remote from barbarian incursion where scribes had been dutifully and ignorantly copying…

Tags: ancient science, biases, higher cognitive functions, human mind, intuitions, irrationality, science, stocks, supernatural, superstition

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The psychology of economic forecasting

by ilene - June 12th, 2009 8:02 pm

The psychology of economic forecasting

Courtesy of Edward Harrison of the site Credit Writedowns.

During the last generation, the economics profession has veered toward a ‘science’ model of economics and finance. The intellectual underpinnings for this development began with the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) and has continued in no small measure due to what is often termed ‘University of Chicago School Economics.’  If you are looking for a good read on what is wrong with the EMH view of the world, you should get ready for Justin Fox’s “The Myth of the Rational Market” which is coming to a bookstore near you.

My own view is that many economists today are really frustrated scientists looking to ply their science and math craft in economics. In reality, economics is a social science with large influences from psychology and the scientific view ignores this.  However, the fact that psychology plays a large role in economics is something that is increasingly appreciated, as the Nobel Prize received by Daniel Kahneman attests.

So, I am not going to discuss EMH or rational markets.  Rather I want to delve into the psychology of economic forecasting and why economists act as they do.  Late last month, I posted an article with an attached video in which Marc Faber made the very astute comment, “it’s very tough for a forecaster who was ultra-bearish to stay bearish, because if he’s wrong he has a reputational risk.”  What I believe Faber was saying is this: an economist who is proved wrong is an economist who loses credibility.  This statement is at the heart of economic forecasting.

What Faber is giving voice to is the very real concern that any economic forecaster feels in making a prediction. If one is proved right, then plaudits will follow.  If one gets it wrong, the Bronx cheer is what you are likely to get. This is true for macroeconomists as much as for Wall Street analysts.  I will give you two examples from Wall Street to illustrate my point.

Henry Blodget: Amazon to $400

In October of 1998, Blodget predicted that Amazon’s stock would soar to $400 a share.  At the time, he was a little known analyst at Oppenheimer, the same company for which Meredith Whitney worked until recently.  His Amazon prediction propelled Blodget to a much higher status and attracted the attention of Merrill Lynch, the bulge bracket firm to which he moved for a huge salary.  Clearly, making a bold call that…

Tags: economists, Efficient Market Hypothesis, psychology of economic forecasting, science

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