9 thoughts on “Confirmation Bias”

  1. Its ironic that just when everyone is screaming to respect any fringe groups values adn oppinions – even in science and engineering where nothing but the provable facts should be respected, everything is driven to as politically useful consensus with the ellettes.

  3. Are you not worried this scandal fits your priors just a little too well?

    Not really. It didn’t fit my “priors” — it turned out to make me much more of a skeptic than I was previously. Before I saw the “scientists'” behavior, and the appalling computer models, I assumed that there was a long-term warming trend — I was simply unconvinced that humans were causing it, and that even if they were, that the proposed solutions were the best for dealing with it. Now, I’m a skeptic about the warming itself.

  5. Great article. Also the one it linked to on WUWT.

    About that long-term warming trend. Focusing on the current warming trend misses the point. There’s little controversy about the overall temperature trend over the last 150 years or so. (And there shouldn’t be — after all in modern times we have these things called thermometers.) But so what? What’s the a priori problem with a warming trend?

    The important questions are: 1) What is causing it, and 2) What is it leading to?

    One way to put the current warming trend in perspective is to look at temperatures over a longer time period, say 1000+ years. If you look at a millenium-length graph of temperature from a textbook at least 15 years old, you would see another warming period about 1100 years ago, with temperatures eventually going higher than they are today, and then over a few centuries the temperatures reach a platteau and then dip and reach a minimum, until in the 1800’s they start up again, to today when temperatures are again rather warm for the last millenium.

    The mental model I get when I see that picture is that of a sine wave — that there is a periodicity to the long term trends — and hence no reason to be alarmed by the current warming trend.

    In truth, it’s not really that close a fit to a sine wave, but it’s close enough in two important ways: 1) something like what’s happening today happened back around 900-1000 A.D., and there was no Industrial Revolution at that time to explain it, and, 2) there is at least one previous case of a strong warming trend that did not climb relentlessly to calamitous heights, but which over a few centuries reached a plateau not much higher than temperatures today, and then fell again to temperatures much lower than today. These two observations strongly and “inconveniently” counter the alarmist narrative.

    Enter the Hockey Stick. If you look at a 1000 year graph of temperatures published in the last 15 years, the picture is very different. There’s no warming period around 900 A.D., and nothing that even remotely suggests a sine wave. Instead you’ll see a nearly linear decline in temperature from the left side of the graph until about 1850 (the handle of the hockey stick) and then a sharp uptick (the blade.)

    The conclusions one naturally draws from that picture are starkly different than the older one. On the new graph there is no precedent for the current warming, and it seems that something dramatic and unique happened right at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Not surprisingly, the first graph to look like this was the work of Michael Mann, one if the high priests of AGW.

    It is the revision of the old data that is the real trick of the warmists. It’s not the recent, (thermometer-based) data that fuels the alarmist fire, it’s the old data, the data that is based on things like tree rings, and ice cores, and other natural phenomen that are considered temperature “proxies” by climate scientsist. If you think there is opportunity to fudge something as straightforward as thermometer readings, imagine the games that can be played with temperatures based on tree rings.

    So, the modern record may well have been tampered with to some extent, but the heart of the matter is not the modern record, but the modern revisionism of the “Hockey Team”. The longer-scale temperature record has been completely rewritten to support an alarmist conclusion. Even with a strong modern warming trend, without a hockey stick shaped long-term record, there is simply no apparent reason to suspect that it is mainly due to man-made pollution, or to think it will continue upward unabated — in short, no reason to be alarmed.

  6. Rand Simberg @ December 10th, 2009 at 12:24 pm

    Furthermore, I personally felt the odds of those solutions being effected were virtually nil. How many signatories to the Kyoto accords met their targets? Even the undoubtedly bogus outcomes don’t look so good.

    When the choice is between immediate comfort and long term sacrifice for a hypothetical gain, people will choose immediate comfort every time. And, I’m not dissing the human race to say so, as others would be. I think it would be the logical game theoretic policy. Were CO2 production really a threat, I am convinced the only solution would be active sequestration.

    But, the failure of such accords in their stated objectives does not mean they would have no consequences, mostly bad.

  8. When the choice is between immediate comfort and long term sacrifice for a hypothetical gain, people will choose immediate comfort every time.

    The choice would be a lot clearer, if the gain weren’t so “hypothetical”. Active sequestration only makes since if there’s a problem.

  9. Hi,
    Yes I agree with Karl Hallowell as The idea of sacrifice lends itself readily to distortion and manipulation, and over time, the concept of individual sacrifice has been completely corrupted.Within the fundamentalist sects of some religions, sacrifice has come to mean doing without comfort and even inflicting pain.

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