re: #77 dogg

Okay I am a dummy.

If as a country we are committing to incurr zillions in costs to Cap and Trade, then why is there no real public discourse on the subject?

All the propaganda has proven wrong to date… polar bear extinction, rising sea levels, warming over the last five years.

Please we need some emperical evidence besides the melting polrar caps that has happened in the past before.

Imagine there’s a roulette wheel, and it has 20 slots saying warmer (1) and 18 slots saying colder (0), but we don’t get to see the slots. All we see is the sequence of W’s and C’s. So we look at 200 spins of the wheel, and here’s what we see:
1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1,
1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1,
0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0,
1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1,
1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0,
0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0,
1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1,
0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1,
1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1.

So I say, hey, the wheel is biased. It gives more 1’s than 0’s. And you say, proves nothing. This could easily have happened by chance alone. And you know, you’re right. The result of these spins proves nothing. With a perfectly fair wheel, we’d get a result this extreme or more about 14 percent of the time.

But then you say, and what’s more, in the past 30 years, it’s gotten cooler. This shows that in fact we don’t have any more global spinning. And I say, that proves nothing. That, even more than the overall spins story which I concede doesn’t prove much, is something that could easily have happened by chance, and what’s more, I think you sort of cherry picked your time interval.

The chance of this 13 out of 30 fluctuation, or more extreme, is about 30 percent with a fair wheel, and still over 20% assuming a 20 to 18 edge for warmer. The chance that you could find a run like that by picking when to start is better still.

The science to this point is closing in on all wrapped up, but the topic is complicated and it remains an outside possibility that there is some sort of feedback we don’t recognize that will prevent any major warming. But don’t think that that little run of cool weather proves that we’re off the hook. Gamblers think they’re hot when really those random fluctuations to the upside serve merely to gull them into betting more at bad odds, full of hope and ignorance. The House always wins in the long run, and CO2 really is a greenhouse gas.

Footnote: I used real random numbers and I didn’t try twice to get a better example.