Independent statisticians reject ‘global cooling’ fable

BPSDB“WASHINGTON — Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book.

Only one problem: It’s not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press (for full story).”

Nice! Of course the climate science and science blogs have been saying so all along, repeatedly (below), but this independent AP story can be nothing but good news for the fact based, rational world.

[UPDATE 22:30 EST The APS story has +100,000 search engine hits already – wonderful! Kudos to Seth Borenstein]

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Scary Monsters (And superfreakonomics)

“When I looked in her eyes they were blue,

but nobody home”BPSDB

I thought I was done with this particular tar baby and would just leave it to Brian to keep track of the ongoing discussion of Superfreakonomics, but like others (eg here and here) I just can’t seem to shake it off. Actually there are some good reasons to revisit it, so please bear with me … or jump right to “what you can do.”

• He’s right

• It’s bad, seriously bad

• Popular sentiment

• Why it matters

• What you can do

He’s right

An interesting exchange took that took place on a forum a couple of days ago raised an important question generally, but with reference to Superfreaknonomics specifically. As is too often the case the more general discussion will have to wait while we deal with the Superfreaks.

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