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

To: The Vet who wrote (14546)	12/4/2009 8:56:50 PM
From: RetiredNow	2 Recommendations Respond to of 86356

Vet, mindmeld, doesn't it worry you that these computer models can produce such convincing predictions, when similar models can't accurately predict the weather a few days in advance? Absolutely not. This is an often used argument by laypeople who don't understand the way trend analysis in statistics work. Statistical models create an equation and that equation is represented by a trend chart. If you look at the trend average over a long period of time, it is a smooth line. But if you put all the data on a graph, what you'll see looks like a scatter plot with dots potentially varying wildly. The smooth line is simply the regression line, or simply put the average that runs through the scatter plot. The shorter your time horizon, the wilder the variation from the mean may look. The longer your time horizon, the more accurate the trend line looks. So it always amuses me to hear people saying, "it snowed where I live yesterday. I guess global warming was a hoax." Equally laughable is when they say, "it's cooling in the US this year. That means GW is a hoax." Well guess what. That's anecdotal information that tells you nothing about the trend. It's natural variation. In fact, we experienced cooling in the US, but other parts of the earth experienced record warming. Here's the Oct'09 global temperature anomaly chart from NASA. You'll note that the globe was still experiencing global warming anomalies, despite North American cooling. Below it, is the long term trend chart for anomalies, which shows that this thing is accelerating. Look guys, the science is real. We need to go back to trusting science, because science is this country's strength. Let's not turn our back on science now, when our economic prosperity and the fate of the human race depends on it: data.giss.nasa.gov data.giss.nasa.gov