Anthropogenic Global Warming

I wrote this because this professional association of statisticians has remained fairly quiet on global warming. As I recall a few years ago they did publish an article that pointed out all sorts of flaws with the science at the time. The article referenced below also points out many data processing errors. I am no longer going to sit back; I am now in the letter writing business. I will be happy to explain model bias separately if you contact me.


To the ASA Membership Chair and to the Editors of Amstat News:

The article “Statisticians Comment on Status of Climate Change Science” in the March 2010 issue of Amstat News left me wondering whether the dues I pay to the American Statistical Association are paying for any part of the work by ASA’s Climate Change Policy Advisory Committee. Please know that I do not want my dues funding this committee and I do not want ASA making position statements on the status of “climate change science” on its behalf. Additionally, if ASA makes statements on behalf of its members, which includes me, about the notion of anthropogenic global warming, I will terminate my membership in the Association.

I remain a skeptic of the “overwhelming” science of anthropogenic global warming because, as an industrial statistician, model bias from failing to include important factors leads to precarious conclusions, at best. It seems to me that because there is evidence that CO2 levels were twice as high as they are now millions of years ago, long before humankind walked the earth, there are surely factors missing from current models, factors that would have caused prior warming periods and periods of elevated CO2. Furthermore plotting temperature data collected from small patches of the earth’s surface over the past 140 years would have no discernible (hockey stick) trend (i.e. be part of the noise) if plotted over 400,000 years or 4,000,000 years or 4,000,0000,000 years. Don’t we teach our statistics students to plot data scaled in context, to avoid making false claims?

Yours truly,