Sampling Error serving Confirmation Bias
Rational reading of irrational discourse on climate change
In receiving “news” from any source these days, the consumer needs strong doses of skepticism fed by critical evaluation of the sources, language and arguments used, methods by which the writer evaluated information or data presented, any logical fallacies, and the final intent. This last is a most critical part, as almost no “news” is reportage, or recitation of facts, speech, and events, anymore. Every writer, including this one, seeks to broadcast opinions that they hope will be valued and convincing. That fact must, contrary to what our President once said, must get in the way of whatever truth the writer describes. Separating and recognizing facts from what may be someone’s purposely fictional truth is the reader’s prime responsibility.
Two major pitfalls are often the obvious keystones of fakery. In true science (not scientism) individual points of measurable and quantifiable information are detected and collected, which in physics is problematic since “observation changes the state” of that informational item. But a first major potential problem is sampling error. Was the sample of data large enough to provide statistically significant knowledge? Even then we remember Mark Twain’s admonition about ”lies, damned lies, and statistics”. Was the data over a long enough period of time to truly illuminate a process, changing or unchanging? Was the information collected using the same techniques over time, or is any adjustment for different measurement methods demonstrably valid? Is the technique of data collection intrinsically valid, or is it biased by methods, timing, site, or other problems? What data out of the total collected was chosen for evaluation, why, and why was other data discarded? These are only a few of the features of the sampling error pitfall that must be considered whenever anyone seeks to use hard information, not opinion or logic, to justify a position or action.
Journalists, most of whom are infotainment officers with an obvious socio political intent, and virtually all political figures find sampling error a beneficial if subliminal accomplice in service of the second major problem in public rhetoric, confirmation bias. The presenter of informational arguments has sought information and evaluated that information on the basis of already made assumptions or beliefs. They “sieve” the data, whether complete or not, without considering sampling error or other aspects of the scientific method. That method, despite common misrepresentation, is still very strict. A purveyor of pre-purposed information (otherwise called disinformation, misinformation, and now malinformation) will present theory, rather than hypothesis. The latter is an idea that is used to create an investigation, by data acquisition or dialectic, in order to prove/disprove the idea. Only after many such trials of an hypothesis can it be accepted generally as a theory, a description of truth based in data. It bears repeating—Separating and recognizing facts from what may be someone’s purposely fictional truth is the reader’s prime responsibility. The reader themselves must evaluate the presentation as mere hypothesis, see its weaknesses, consider other “tests” of the same idea from other sources, and decide if the theory fits the facts, if a truth is being presented. That process is the kernel of healthy skepticism.
Climate change is an hypothesis lacking status as a theory. We are told daily in catastrophic language that industrial human activity is actively changing global processes that have varied, evolved, and self-corrected for 4.5 billion years in reversing and irreversible ways. According to climate alarmists, we must act now and persistently as individuals, as well as collectively accepting rigidly enforced external limitations on our activities and lifestyles “before it is too late” and we cook the planet’s life out of existence. Mavens of climate mayhem proliferate, metastasizing from vocally violent activist groups with a unifocal view of reality into our governments, our corporations, our entertainment, and our journalistic propagandists. With minimal presentation of carefully selected information (sampling error) they invoke the logical fallacy of an appeal to authority, citing various national and international organizations beyond our influence or sovereignty.
A relatively dampened example of climate hysteria seeking to use fear to invoke a mass formation neurosis if not psychosis is the statement of the director-general of the WHO. He is quoted recently, “The hottest month just ended. We witnessed scorching heat, extreme weather events, wildfires, and severe health consequences. It’s a stark reminder of the urgent need for collective action to address climate change. Let’s use this alarming milestone to fuel our determination for bold climate action. Together, we can turn up the heat (?) on sustainable solutions and create a cooler, more resilient world for generations to come.”
The insistence of the WHO in urging international top-down action on the major industrialized nations—but not China or India—is based on their new extension of international sovereignty over all nations that sign on to their new WHO-CA treaty. That “treaty” takes force immediately by executive mandate in individual nations without the need for consent of the governed. The WHO uses the new concept of “One Health” to attain authority over all human activity. The WHO assumes, under this concept, control over all peoples and all nations, to become the sole guardian of Gaia, our planet Earth.
As unacknowledged, unelected agents of this authority and mandate, our governmental, corporate, and media authorities parrot the message of existential immediate threat to our lives and well-being using assumptions long found to be false, computer models that persistently fail in their predictions, and data based in virtually all the mechanisms of sampling error noted above. Many may be too young to remember the dire predictions in the 1970’s of “global cooling” that were widely publicized, discussed, and used to attempt to begin societal control. Al Gore’s famous film and campaign, “An Inconvenient Truth”, has failed in all its predictions, but succeeded in establishing his very lucrative international carbon offset business. Numerous other computer climate models have not been borne out. We continue to receive dire confirmatory warnings of climate change based on individual weather events, the most egregious kind of sampling error. Our President leads the nation in misrepresenting “facts” to convince us of his “truth”. He recently said, “record temperatures—and I mean record—are now affecting more than 100 million Americans. Puerto Rico reached a 125-degree heat index last month. San Antonio hit an all-time heat index high of 117 last month.” The heat index is not a measure of temperature—rather an adjustment of the actual temperature adding in the effects of humidity whose changes may be separable from temperature alone. Puerto Rico’s temperature was 95; that in San Antonio was 105. Striking, nonetheless. The President added that heat was the major weather-related killer worldwide. This was a false statement comprising half a million deaths worldwide per another data source, while cold kills several millions more. NOAA recorded 148 deaths from heat related illness in the U.S.A. while Mr. Biden, without source, states that 600 died.
Aside from misrepresenting and mistaking data, the climate nihilists’ methodology of data collection is fraught with sampling error and confirmation bias. Two climate scientists who heretically don’t agree with “the consensus” and yet have been awarded national recognition for their work find that most reported temperatures in the U.S. are measured in local or regional hot spots. The recording stations are in “urban heat islands” composed of large areas of concrete, asphalt, and heat-retaining buildings, or if in outlying areas placed next to buildings or at airports rather than in open areas that truly measure the area’s temperature due to weather. This sampling error persists and expands despite the entertaining history of Dalhart, Texas during the 1960’s. That small city in the Texas panhandle frequently reported the hottest or coldest temperatures in the nation for years. Finally it was discovered that the civilian volunteer recorder-reporter was faking the readings just to bring attention to that city. It’s extremes have moderated ever since. The two climate scientists note that various areas in the country and regions of the world have had episodes of hotter weather in recent years, but again based on measurements in markedly expanding urban heat islands. One climatologist prefes that, “for long-term temperature accuracy, rural stations with at least 100 years of records are best to follow.” Just not Dalhart.
These same two scientists have long pursued and published temperature data acquired from a more unbias-able and methodologically accurate source. They have used microwave data readings from satellites with data beginning in 1979. As a result, they find that, although the 19th century was one of the coldest in the last 10,000 years (called the “mini Ice Age” in Europe), global temperatures have risen back towards their averages since, and from 1979 by 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. Local transient factors, such as El Nino weather patterns and the gigantic eruption of volcano Hunga Tonga massively saturating part of our atmosphere with water vapor, have distorted areas of the globe recently. Even so, the 1930’s remain the hottest decade in modern U.S. history, not any recent year or season.
No one should deny that climate change is real. Our globe has always and will continue to cycle through periods of higher and lower temperatures over millennia. Weather is that which happens over shorter periods and in smaller areas. The natural warming of the planet we can now measure and follow has been mostly beneficial when viewed in terms of increased global food production from longer growing seasons and modestly (in epochal terms) higher atmospheric CO2 levels These are feeding an planet-wide expansion of greenery without governmental intervention, in the Sahel region for example, by satellite imaging. Human activity since the Industrial Age has had some effect, however minimal. Human measurement of temperature, as we have seen, may have had more of an effect. Meanwhile we in the U.S. have reduced our emissions very significantly while much of the developed and developing world massively increases emissions.
One statement by our Climate Crisis Pandora’s is appropriate—We need to seek and acquire greater resilience to climate variability. But, contrary to their plans, it must be in economically feasible ways. Over the last 23 years our world has spent $6.5 trillion dollars moving away from fossil fuels. The result has been a global reduction in fossil fuel use from 82% to 81%. If our goal is an immediate Noah’s Ark of “net zero”, you do the math. This is especially concerning given that, as one of the aforementioned climate scientists stated, “(the climate alarmists) exaggerate the effects of global warming, the scare about storms and hot weather, and then (they) downplay the cost—try(ing) to explain that it’s really not going to cost anything because the government will pay for it.” With what money, sourced where, you might ask? The scientist goes on, “This is really a kind of battle between conventional energy and renewable energy. And renewable energy isn’t commercially viable. So, people are being forced to use it, to buy it”. We all know by now that the mechanisms to source that renewable energy are produced by or from products of China, the biggest and fastest growing emissions provider globally. The true net carbon production of any of renewable energy method throughout its life cycle is always greater than prudentially improving use of fossil fuels, and even nuclear energy. Refining and exporting greater expertise in use of and reduced need for fossil fuels is true resilience. Until such time as the free market, not governmental force, provides economical alternatives. After all is said and asserted, fossil fuels are a global, finite, and diminishing resource. Our good stewardship requires ever more wise use of our resources without deliberately extinguishing our lifestyles. Let us base our debate on that truly existential issue on commonly definable unbiased facts. Caveat Lector.
My thanks to Katie Spence and her unbiased, exacting reportage in the August 9, 2023 issue of The Epoch Times, which is the widely quoted basis for this essay.