In Orlando, Florida, before cell phones and texting were a problem at all (1992), I used to watch myself go through a dark yellow light and then watch the next 8 cars go through after me. It was so bad that Red lights were almost viewed as green lights because the people on the cross street had to wait for all the people going through red lights before starting, which was just about when their red light started.

Bad driving is everywhere. It doesn't need texting to make it worse. It was already worse.

They are only acting as the authority to point out the problems. There are huge problems in epidemiology. The really useful data gathered by epidemiology is not the positive correlations, it is the non correlations. This presents a rather ugly problem. The data that people find interesting are the positive correlations. With the exception of 1 or 2 studies, these are pretty much worthless. The data that shows a link isn't there is what is really useful. This is the source of all the bad research.

If you look at epidemiological studies, you find lots of RRs, HRs, and ORs (Relative Risk, Hazard Ratio, Odds Ratio). The confounding factor that is ignored is the Survival Ratio. The ratio of the survivors of doing something to the survivors of not doing that something. This number is almost always 99.99...% One exception is lung cancer and smoking. The survival ratio there is 92%. 92% of people who smoke their whole lives do not get lung cancer. (some simplification here).

Yet another bloke claiming settled.

Lovely RED chart at the top imbuing you with an overwhelming sense of overheating.

Then you find the "proof" of warming down at the bottom. A carefully excised anomalous temperature chart that. 0.5C total range with a tail pointing down.

Plot the temperature folks. It ain't hard. BEST has it available for free. http://berkeleyearth.org/data

All you have to do is parse and plot. I have been pawing through the data from each station. Temperature ranges everywhere. Some really cool ones in Eastern Russia. No where can you see increases over the last 150 years. Way to close to a flat line.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html

What the iowahawk talks about in the averages for schools is relevant to the discussion of temperatures.

Science, in studies like this, manages to forget science. Science is finding what is wrong with your idea.

These folks (and all people who practice epidemiology irrationally, which is most) get lost in death and forget life.

Way back in 1993, I visited an atomic laboratory in Pennsylvania. On the tour, they showed us the 30,000 core computing machine they had purchased several years before. "We still can't program it".

30 seconds later he pointed to the next piece of metal.

This is our 120,000 core computer.

I raised my hand "Why did you buy a 120,000 core machine when you can't even program the 30,000 core machine!"

"Well it's faster."

one of my early lessons in big companies attacking the wrong problem.

How do you make the assessment to jump over threshhold and be dick anyway?

There are times when it is necessary to ignore the rules.

here is a picture of the CRU data they released recently. http://www.io-solutions.com/WorldTemps1700-2011wAnoAveCount.jpg

ALL OF IT. That red line in the middle is the GISS temperature anomaly. The Orange dots are the simple average of each months data. All of the gray dots are dots experienced somewhere on the planet.

My analysis.

1. GISS temps seem to match CRU temps.
2. The warming visible if you just look at the Anomaly is almost invisible if you look at the range of temperatures.

Basically you have a bunch of people examining the leaves of a tree in a forest and forgetting to keep track of the forest.

The forest does matter.

Here is the CRU Date plotted against time.

http://www.io-solutions.com/WorldTemps1700-2011wAnoAveCount.jpg

That is all the data mind you. The gray dots are station data. The GISS Anomaly Temp is in red. The Simple Mean is in Orange. The black on the bottom is the number of measurements taken. The darker the gray dot the more stations reported that temperature.

Yes this is sophomoric, but basically it tells me someone is playing Charting games to make this look terrible.

Learning a new language doesn't take huge amounts of time. Watching the next wave of 'tools' come washing over the side that will make me more productive because it "just does it", makes me laugh. If all anyone does is what the next tool was designed to do, it just does it, but for some reason no one ever wants to stick just with what it does and suddenly I am figuring out how to twist the new tool to do what the inspired people want.

I suspect the real lesson I need to learn well is "Use programming to make your life easier, don't attempt to make a living programming".

Every time I hear a manager say "That's not hard to do is it?", you should be able to do that in a couple of minutes, I cringe.

http://www.io-solutions.com/WorldTemp1870-2011wAnomaly.jpg

Here is a chart of the GISS anomaly (in red) plotted over the CRU raw data. This isn't the entire history of the earth of course, but it does represent the raw data associated with the Claim the earth has a fever.

I am not sure I can quite agree that the earth has a fever.

No one will be scammed.

Which only proves that event those educated can be baffled by Bull#*@). Skeptics don't close their minds to any of the things stated, they just realize that its nonsense. James Randi repeatedly tries to expose such concepts as Feng Shui, Astrology, etc with double blind tests. People who are in the fields though DO NOT WANT double blind tests because nothing shows up.

Nothing wrong with massage, but it is also subject to the same idiocies as Feng Shui.

The magic though is that people will pay you more if you do make them believe. I don't blame you for believing. It probably keeps food on your table. That is the number one rule that should never be forgotten.