Another "Orifice" statistic

Probabilities are a pervasive feature of scientific reporting.  It is very rare to be able to study all the instances of some phenomenon so sampling the available instances and reporting the probability that the sample will generalize to the whole is routine.

But to report a probability in a scientific paper, one normally has to do several other things.  One has to report on how the data was gathered, summarize the data (often in the form of means and standard deviations) and nominate the statistical procedure  used to convert the data into probabilities. Leaving out any of those steps renders the final conclusion dubious to say the least.  If any of those steps is omitted the editor's referees will normally ask for them to be added before publication.

Warmists don't work like that.  Their prized probability statistic is that it is 90% certain that humans are causing global warming.  But nobody has ever revealed how that statistic was calculated  or upon what data it was based.  "Leaks" have suggested that it was simply decided on a show of hands among the Warmists in the room at the time.  So what looks like a solid scientific assessment is  nothing of the sort.  It is just opinion -- and the opinion of a small, self-interested group at that.

So how are the Warmists coping with the fact that there is NO recent warming to base ANY estimate of human culpability on?  Have they abandoned their pseudo probabilities altogether, as logic  would suggest they must?  Not at all.  They have upped the ante and now say that they are 95% certain of human-caused warming.  Until they explain how that figure is arrived at, however, skeptics are calling it an "orifice" statistic -- meaning that it was just pulled out of a well-known body orifice.  A excerpt of the latest nonsense follows

Climate scientists are surer than ever that human activity is causing global warming, according to leaked drafts of a major UN report, but they are finding it harder than expected to predict the impact in specific regions in coming decades.

Drafts seen by Reuters of the study by the UN panel of experts, due to be published next month, say it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities - chiefly the burning of fossil fuels - are the main cause of warming since the 1950s. That is up from at least 90 percent in the last report in 2007, 66 percent in 2001, and just over 50 in 1995, steadily squeezing out the arguments by a small minority of scientists that natural variations in the climate might be to blame.

That shifts the debate onto the extent of temperature rises and the likely impacts, from manageable to catastrophic. Governments have agreed to work out an international deal by the end of 2015 to rein in rising emissions. "We have got quite a bit more certain that climate change ... is largely manmade," said Reto Knutti, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. "We're less certain than many would hope about the local impacts."

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).