This one was great. I was visiting www.climate.gov, the new NOAA propagandist website on climate change, watching a video on African Meningitis and Climate change. I stopped watching when the speaker said this:
"Much about how and why these epidemics occur is unknown, but we do know that climate plays a key role."
Hmmm...
Apparently, we don't know how or why meningitis epidemics occur in Africa, but we do know that Global Warming will make it all worse.
Science!
Post ridiculous global warming claims here.
Not really a claim, but for once I got a kick out of Sunday's "Get Fuzzy" strip.
I now know that most of you are Algoraphobes, which also makes you warm ongers.
http://news.yahoo.com/comics/get-fuzzy# ... a/20100702
None of you will top "Water World." What got me was one of my co-workers, a PhD physicist, actually believed it was possible. I tossed out some numbers on the volume of ice in the poles, allowed for a bit more elsewhere, and showed that you might flood some coastlines but not mountains. He responded that I had neglected the expansion of water with temperature. I proposed a simple calculation he should do to understand the magnitude of that effect. He was willing to buy that fantasy without so much as a crack at the numbers, which he was fully equipped to handle.
And no, it was not Doc.
I now know that most of you are Algoraphobes, which also makes you warm ongers.
http://news.yahoo.com/comics/get-fuzzy# ... a/20100702
None of you will top "Water World." What got me was one of my co-workers, a PhD physicist, actually believed it was possible. I tossed out some numbers on the volume of ice in the poles, allowed for a bit more elsewhere, and showed that you might flood some coastlines but not mountains. He responded that I had neglected the expansion of water with temperature. I proposed a simple calculation he should do to understand the magnitude of that effect. He was willing to buy that fantasy without so much as a crack at the numbers, which he was fully equipped to handle.
And no, it was not Doc.
Seed load is absolutely correct in this perversion of 'science'.
Anyone from any institutional body claiming any academic credentials should never say "We don't know how A happens, but we know B affects it" because by that statement the speaker has fundamentally stated that they don't know if A and B are co-incident or consequent. The medical world particularly suffers from this 'false association' error. It is fatally flawed (irrespective of whether it is to do with AGW).
Anyone from any institutional body claiming any academic credentials should never say "We don't know how A happens, but we know B affects it" because by that statement the speaker has fundamentally stated that they don't know if A and B are co-incident or consequent. The medical world particularly suffers from this 'false association' error. It is fatally flawed (irrespective of whether it is to do with AGW).
Not really. I used to sit on a Medical Research Ethics committee and the research proposals we saw from all sorts, academics, practitioners, students, were, more often than you'd expect in other fields, based on associations. "We provide intervention X, we are looking for outcome Y. X will be shown to be successful if Y is the outcome in more than 10% (to k=2 [95% confidence])"DeltaV wrote:I believe you mean medical industry.
I will dare to say that this is, in majority, the norm for medical research. Double blind tests help, but you'd be surprised at how many ways 'confirmation bias' can creep into even how those are set up.
A classic example - salt leading to heart disease. Now there is not much doubt that too much salt in the body leads to heart problems, but that't got to be a sunstantial amount of salt, and it does so by disruption of the electrical signals! The body filters it and chucks out what it doesn't need, so how can that lead to long term conditions?!
The reason studies show people who eat a lot of salt get heart problems isn't because salt causes heart problems but simply that if you eat a lot of salt it probably means you eat a lot of fatty food that tastes better with salt on!