[asa] Corrupted science & "The Madness of Crowds" / Inside story on Bali

Here are two items of BSR for the day to pass on far and wide. ~ Janice

[1] Corrupted science & "The Madness of
Crowds":
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/12/the_algorism_of_global_doom.html
Short excerpts:

[....] "...Science Magazine just published
another
<http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22922985-5009760,00.html>Global
Doom Scenario. This one predicts for the nth time
that Australia's Great Barrier Reef is really,
really doomed for sure this time. Where have we
heard this before? There are now more than
twenty Global Warming models -- we never hear
about the ones that don't predict Global Doom,
because Science magazine isn't interested. Those
results appear in less august journals. (See
<http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3223603.ece>this
or
<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=48F687F3-E7F2-99DF-3E042E20A4B66A99&chanID=sa003>this
for exmaples.)

Like any ecosystem, coral reefs evolve and adapt,
which is how they have survived for hundreds of
millions of years. Coral organisms got started
during the 'Cambrian explosion' of half a billion
years ago -- that's 500,000,000 years. Corals
have gone through Ice Ages and warming periods
over and over again during that half billion
years. Micro-organisms like corals can adapt to
changing temperatures with amazing speed, because
they reproduce so
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17508333&ordinalpos=5&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum>quickly.
They are not "fragile." They are immensely
adaptable. Otherwise they
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=15306800&ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVAbstractPlus>wouldn't
be here.

Coral reefs cover an estimated 300 thousand
square kilometers -- five times the size of West
Virginia. They are far too complex to model in
detail. The truth is that we can't model even a
single ecosystem anywhere in the world, because
they are much too complicated, the genomes of
their inhabitants are unknown, and it's not
remotely possible to track every single variable.
So this is again a wild guess with the same result. .....

Suppose that the Great Barrier Reef modelers
looked at a lot of evidence before they came out
with the Doom Prediction. Then they sent it to
Science. If their model predicted "It's OK,
everybody's safe!" you can bet it wouldn't have
been published there. In that case, one of the
other 600 Doom scenarios
<http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/11/everything_is_caused_by_global.html>collected
by Dr. John Brignell might have been headlined in
Science to celebrate with the Bali conference,
and to suppress the secret doubts of True Believers everywhere.

Thus the Algorists are running after that elusive
smoking gun with all the desperation of Osama Bin
Laden seeking his Caliphate. Bin Laden will never
give up his belief that he has been chosen by
Allah to rescue the world from the infidels and
to establish the Caliphate. AlGore won't either.

"..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
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds>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 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. [...]" ~ James Lewis /
Complete commentary
here: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/12/the_algorism_of_global_doom.html

[2] INSIDE STORY ON THE BALI CONFERENCE
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1942155/posts Short excerpt:

[...] "...As with the 35 errors in Gore’s movie,
so with the 50 in his speech to the zombies in
Bali, comfortably exceeding his personal best –
all the errors tend towards an extreme and
scientifically-unwarranted exaggeration of the
imagined threat posed by “global warming”. The
zombies, of course, lapped up every word handed
down from on high by Baron Thursdi, for Bali was
a science-free, fact-free zone, question-free
zone. The probability that all 43 of Gore’s
latest errors could have pointed by mere accident
and ignorance in the direction of excessive alarm
is less than one in a million billion.

Therein lies a danger that Gore has not yet seen.
For he failed, yet again, to declare his
financial interest before whipping up worldwide
alarm with his trademark errors and exaggerations
in Bali. He is a director of Lehman Brothers, a
global finance house that wants to control the
worldwide managed market in carbon-emissions
trading. He founded his own “green” corporation,
Generation Investment Management. He is a paid
member of the Board of a renewable-energy company.

In the UK, if he made a speech containing so many
deliberate and unidirectional errors as he did in
Bali, and if he failed to declare his financial
interest, he would be committing a criminal offence.

It is surely only a matter of time before a
complaint is filed with the Securities and
Exchange Commission, alleging that, through the
numerous, extreme and scientifically-unwarranted
exaggerations which Gore has relentlessly
continued to peddle notwithstanding the warning
in the UK judge’s verdict, he is in effect
fraudulently promoting a false prospectors to
potential investors. Indeed, his exaggerations
are on such a scale, and have commanded such
attention, and have done so much damage, that he
may even have committed an offence under the F
ederal racketeering statute. I wanted to ask Gore
about his failure to disclose his financial
interest, but – as usual – he does not dare to
take questions. .." [..] - Click above link and
refresh browser to read complete commentary.

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Received on Thu Dec 20 08:37:00 2007