Full of Hot Air

In the spirit of a terrible football game last night, I was reading what I thought to be a football piece here. However, at the end, it makes an interesting parallel to the global warming crisis. I sort of like the combination of science and politics in this issue, so I will discuss it. For those of you under a rock, a recent report by the Intergorvernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released its latest findings on global warming. It has been widely reported in all forms of media, like the article here. A nice breakdown of the information comes from RealClimate.org. This isnt really new news. As a science enthusiast, I read magazines like Scientific American. They have been talking about this issue (albiet more recently due to the IPCC report) in articles like this one and Blogging about it here. I also have seen the documentary An Inconvienent Truth, starring Al Gore. As strange as that sounds, the movie was actually pretty good. Whether or not Gore was politicing, or if he is truly a crusader for this issue, is irrelevant. This is something that needs to be discussed in public forums, and deserves the most serious attention. It wasn't too long ago that the Conservative folks in the US were trying to kill global warming as a bunch of tree-hugging hippy crap. Read some conservative literature here, and note the publication date. More desenters change their minds here. Mr. George Will talks about the issue here. Scientific American's website yields this search result link when asked about global warming. Seems pretty convincing. However, there are still many people who disagree; read this, if just for the entertainemnt value. A great excerpt: "Massachusetts Institute of Technollogy's Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology Richard S. Lindzen complained to the Boston Globe about the "shrill alarmism" of Gore's flick. Neil Frank, who was considered authoritative when he was the director of the National Hurricane Center, told The Washington Post that global warming is "a hoax." Hurricane expert William Gray of Colorado State University believes the Earth will start to cool within 10 years." Most of this dissent is based on there being no "proof" that global warming exists - strictly speaking, this is true. It is much the same argument that was used to defend the tobacco companies; that there was no "proof" that cigarettes caused cancer and other health problems. This has been largely debunked - there is legal precedent relating to tobacco smoke in public areas, for example. There are still people who do not believe the smoking causal relationship either. There is a very interesting article relating to this very topic called "In defence of Smokers". The best part: "The anti-smoking crowd insists that smokers prove to them that smoking is not harmful. That's a trap. Nobody can prove a negative, i.e., that something is not so." It goes on to say this: "Where smoking is concerned, it's obvious that if everybody who smoked developed lung cancer, we could say, conclusively, that smoking "causes" lung cancer. But we all know that not everybody who smokes develops lung cancer, and we also all know of many people who don't smoke a day in their lives, but none-the-less develop lung cancer at an early age and die from the disease." This is, of course, designed to fit the author's argument. these types of arguments are used in both the legal and political world to blur the facts and allow information to reflect the views of the speaker; they are comonly referred to as the Prosecutor's Fallacy. In truth, the easiest way to undertand this burden of proof is through the statistical concept of Standard Error. In order to "prove" something, we can say that the Standard Error must be zero - no deviation. This is only possible when the number of samples (denoted 'n') is infinite, or the standard deviation of the sampling is zero. This will never be the case. We therfore must use other statistical methods. The results of these statistical methods show a high probability of a causal relationship in both the global warming and smoking example. Althought people may require different levels of confidence before internalizing a causal relationship, they must be careful not to be so stringent that they miss the chance to affect the outcome.