For most of my life, I have heard all about how evil men are because we're polluting the planet. Ok, so many of us aren't very conscientious about where we put our waste, but then again neither are the Canadian geese that used to defecate EVERYWHERE at my alma mater. However, they talk about these doomsday prophecies and make movies about their predictions when many of their conclusions are founded in bad science.
At the beginning of each semester, I cover the Scientific Method with my students. I point out the pitfalls and problems in an effort to help them pay better attention to scientists, especially as they start prescribing pills produced by piss-poor projects. Lo and behold, today, an article appears less than a day after I discussed this with a colleague about how the polar ice is melting 30% less quickly than projected. The key phrase in this article is as follows:
previous teams had to measure ice loss at "a few easily accessible glaciers" and then extrapolate it to the 200,000 glaciers worldwide
They extrapolated a few to hundreds of thousands. A few technically means three, which is the equivalent of looking at everyone in the city of Linz Austria and saying they are representative of everyone currently living on the planet. This is why some people die from drugs, because everyone reacts differently.
What concerns me is whether the few they analyzed were truly representative of the whole. If they looked at a few outliers, then they will be way off. What made the other glaciers inaccessible? Weather? Money? Laziness of the researchers? Government policy that refused access? There are too many variables to even evaluate that well. They would have been best served to conclude that the data supported a certain level of ice loss in the area surveyed.
I may have mentioned this before, but we did a lot of work with students and standard curves. Intentionally, we gave them an unknown with a concentration outside the standard curve hoping that they would make an error and extrapolate. Outside the curve, you cannot be sure that the behavior remains the same. Even these researchers were smart enough to confess that "it's not clear how far into the future you can project" because too many things affect other things. I find it funny how they claim everything and everyone is related, that we should coexist, etc., and then they blame human activity with which they happen to disagree as a cause for everything. Who knows what the future will bring? Maybe it will bring meteors or Martians or more of the same. Who can say? They like to talk as if they know for sure, and I find that odd.
