George W. Bush’s advisory report on climage change

Tthis is a bit dated - but hey, it’s Friday Thursday and Mr. George W. Bush was nice enough to edit the report so that he wish us to “have a nice day”.  it’s worth posting…

 source: Time Magazine Canada

Too bad he’s not the only person who is denying climate change…

Global Warming Skpetics: “Direct Correlation between Pirates and Global Warming”

Last week,  the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change was held in New York City between March 2 and March 4.   March 8 - 10.  This is the biggest conference of gathering and presentations of Climate Change Skeptics. I agree that we should try looking at climate change from all angles possible and yes there are a lot of uncertainties of the future of our climate that we’re predicting.  I went through a few presentations from last year and found a lot of interesting stories to share….  I’ll start with this one that included the adage “Correlation Is Not Causation the correlation” between pirates and global warming! (*posting updated as Dave pointed out that I’m incorrect on blaming Prof. Hayden for including this slide in his presentation)

This is in the presentation by Howard Hayden, Professor of Physics Emeritus of University of Connecticut, U.S.  Here’s the link to his presentation.  In his presentation, he inserted this slide that he took from the open letter by  the Church of flying spaghetti monster to imply that correlations that current scientists have produced may not have any impact on climate change just like the graph below. The main conclusion was that the fewer pirate there are, the warmer the globe is….  In the open letter, it was stated that quite a well fitted graph can be made when correlating number of pirates versus global temperature.   The graph is included below.  On first glance, it does look like a really good linear fit… BUT.. look again!  the x-axis is not spaced evenly!!! Actually the first number from the left on the x-axis is smaller than the second number while all subsequent number are smaller than the second number!  Well….  this is the type of presentations in this conference?!  

It’s quite a clever graph that Bobby Handerson (the founder of FSM) had! Although his original intention was nothing about mocking the scientists (for climate change), but I guess it has been used here as such tool.  

Do you think climate change evidence provided by scientists are just random correlations?