Make a Difference

Day: October 19, 2009

Maldives Mania

The Maldives Cabinet met underwater last Saturday to draw attention to the tiny nation’s fate if global warming and accompanying rapid sea level rise continues. All very cute and colourful.

Maldives Cabinet Meets Underwater

Maldives Cabinet Meets Underwater

Except for a couple of small points:

1. The world isn’t getting any warmer. That hasn’t stopped the WWF, who are still shouting the world will come to an end if the global economy is not shut down in the next four years.

2. There is no recorded rise in sea level at the Maldives over the last 40 years.

That links opens a PDF document by IPCC author Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden, past president (1999-2003) of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, and leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project.

Interestingly, he says the same thing about Tuvalu – no recorded sea level rise. He also notes that of the 22 authors reponsible for claims about sea level in the 2000 and 2006 IPCC reports, not one is a sea level specialist.

The whole article is well worth reading.

Tricky Cherry Picking

Lucia at The Blackboard has an interesting article on how a global warming scientists can justify the kind of massive cherry-picking that went into the infamous hockey-stick.

First, an explanation of ‘proxies.’ Proxies are so called because we cannot measure past temperatures directly, but have to use stand-ins. These stand-ins (or proxies) may be growth rings or changes in glaciers or sea level or other indirect measures of temperature. The problem with all of these proxies is that temperature is not the only thing that affects them. So they need to be cross-checked and recorded very carefully.

Lucia points out that you can cherry-pick without even meaning to, simply by removing the proxies (sets of tree rings or whatever) that do not correlate with other records of temperature.

I am sure this is possible, but I am not so sure this is what happened in the Mann / Briffa hockey stick invention. The cherry picking in that case seems so clear it is hard to avoid the notion that it amounted to scientific fraud.

To be fair, Briffa insists there was no deliberate pre-selection of data. He now says there were problems with the methodology. We are working on it, he says. In the mean time, everyone should still believe it.

Right.

The Death of Dianne Brimble

The death of Dianne Brimble is a horrible messy tragedy.

Dianne was a kind and likeable woman who lived a reasonably quiet life, and who was never either exciting or attractive by contemporary standards.

She went on a P&O cruise in 2002, and seems to have decided that for once in her life, she was going to break all the rules. Breaking the rules included taking illegal drugs, and having sex with strangers. Her behaviour on the cruise was sordid and degrading.

It is no wonder her family and friends do not want her remembered in this way.

It is also clear that some of the men who ‘befriended’ her on the Pacific Sun are pigs, users and cowards of the first rank.

But the desire to have someone to blame for her death, and the shame of her actions prior to her death, should not be allowed to cloud the fact that no one forced Dianne Brimble to do the things she did on that cruise.

She was an adult. She made choices to behave in ways that, however out of character for her, contributed to her death. This is sad, a terrible way to end her life. But that in itself does not make it OK to blame someone else for her death.

So far, the jury has agreed on a verdict of one of two charges against Mark Wilhelm. The two charges are supplying a prohibited drug, and manslaughter.

It doesn’t take much thought to work out which one the jury is likely to have agreed on. If I am right, then that verdict is reasonable and fair. A guilty verdict on the other charge might be more difficult to justify.

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