Not so scary stories

If you follow the lamestream media, not a week goes by without some scare story and a hue and cry that 'Something must be done'! Usually by politicians. Oftentimes, the scare is based on poor science, or more often poor science journalism. In order to get a headline, the news media will publish an item whose headline will indicate one thing, when the original scientific paper said another.

For example 'Amazon-gate'. The original scientific paper in Portugese, referred to deforestation to the Amazon rain forest caused by forest fires and logging. By the time the story went into the media, it had somehow morphed into one of those interminable 'Global warming' scare stories.

Correction: The claim of 'probable' climate sensitivity to drought came from a defunct Brazilian advocacy site. See this article at Wattsupwiththat, Richard Norths EU Referendum and the Torygraph's Christopher Booker.

The IPCC reports are another case in point; in the references and citations, never mind the scandal of 'grey' literature, scientific papers have been referenced which add nothing to any burden of proof that the political phantasm of 'man made climate change' is a real problem. The originating papers often do not tell the story that the IPCC report tells. Politics appears to warp the real information into some weird looking glass version of the original data. We're talking about original studies with unadjusted data here, not merely statistical studies.

I like to take a more measured approach, and in between being an occasional commenter / heckler / assenting voice on various threads and forums, I try to keep up with what the really clever people say. The late Michael Crichton being one of the more articulate.

Over at Wattsupwiththat, there is a piece reposted from 2003 which is as true now as then, but how the world has changed unnecessarily since then. Here also is the famous 'Charlie Rose' interview.