Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Vet who wrote (14540)	12/4/2009 8:35:00 PM
From: RetiredNow	1 Recommendation Respond to of 86356

Hi Vet, I certainly understand that correlation does not prove causation. However, there has been a warming trend for quite a while and 2008 was an anomaly. In fact, our NOAA just came out with a study that concludes that transitory factors produced the 2008 cooling, which masked the overall warming trend. What you are doing is a classical misattribution of anecdotal evidence to claim that a trend has been broken or never existed. I see this all the time in business processes. We'll see a weakness in a process that gets masked by some other factors for a short period of time. We warn the execs that the underlying exposure still exists and will reassert itself when the random events disappear at the next cycle. They don't listen to us, thinking their problem solved itself and they cut our funding. Then 6 months later, they call us back saying the problem still exists, we were right, and can we come back and fix it. That's classical statistics. Random events sometimes mask trends. Here's an excerpt from the recent NOAA analysis on this topic: North American 2008 Cooling Attributed to Natural Causes noaanews.noaa.gov Cooler North American temperatures in 2008 resulted from a strong natural effect, and the overall warming trend that has been observed since 1970 is likely to resume, according to university and NOAA scientists. “Our work shows that there can be cold periods, but that does not mean the end of global warming. The recent coolness was caused by transitory natural factors that temporarily masked the human-caused signal,” said Judith Perlwitz, lead author of the study and a researcher with the Cooperative Institute for Research Environmental Sciences, and NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory... “Our work shows the importance of the role of natural climate variability in temporarily masking or enhancing human-induced climate change. Through diagnosis, we ensure that natural changes, when occurring, are not misunderstood to mean that climate change is either not happening or is happening more intensely than the expected human influence,” said Arun Kumar, a NOAA meteorologist and co-author.