But as for Mankind being able to prevent a future inundation of a city from rising sea levels well just ask King Canute about that especially as, if this story is to believed, our weapon of choice for this global battle is to reduce the atmospheric concentration of CO2 from 0.0388% back to it's claimed pre-industrial level of 0.0280% while always remembering that this completely non-toxic trace gas is responsible for all the food and consequently life on this wonderful blue marble we live on taking not a small part in Photosynthesis.

Growthgate

February 16, 2010 · 1 Comment

Suppose you have a child, a son — he’s 10. You want to know whether or not he’s growing normally, so every day you measure his height with a tape measure. You’ve done so since he was 5. You even plot the data on a graph, and notice two things about it. First: the measurements show a fair amount of jitter, sometimes they’re a wee bit higher, sometimes a wee bit lower, there’s noise in the data. Second: there’s also a trend. Your kid is a lot taller at 10 than he was at 5, in fact the trend over the observed time span is upward and reasonably steady. You even do a statistical analysis, estimate the growth rate, and determine that it’s definitely statistically significant — so it’s not a false trend due to noise in the data, it’s real. Your son is growing normally.


Then you’re interviewed by a reporter from the Daily Mail. He asks, “Can you prove — with statistical significance — that your child has been growing since last Tuesday?”

You reply that no, even though the trend over that time span is upward, it’s not statistically significant.

The next day you read the article in the Daily Mail which is titled, “Growthgate U-turn as parent admits: There has been no growth since last Tuesday.”

You protest. “I never said my child wasn’t growing! I just said that the data over such a short time span didn’t show it with statistical significance! That’s only because on such a short time scale, the noise obscures the trend.”

Alas, it’s too late, the damage is done, because 3500 blogs have repeated the article from the Daily Mail and child protective services has been asked to investigate your fitness as a parent.

Sound familiar?