Can’t help notice the sudden rise at around the time that the International Gold standard was abolished. Someone shoud check if this also corrolates with the value of the dollar, or the national debt.

Federal Reserve money printing causes global warming, too! Map it against the temperature and CO2 production curves; like the decline in pirates it also causes Global Warming.

A good illustration of the perils of post-hoc, ergo propter hoc analysis–the primary mode of thinking in ‘science’ today.

How exactly is the CO2 and global warming necessarily fallacious if it is known that CO2 is a heat-retaining gas? Or for that matter if industrial processes create nett CO2 emissions which include the production of postage stamps?

Link seems to be broken as of 1105 GMT 03/05 .

@Gil:
Humanity account for maybe 2% of the CO2 in the atmosphere – the lumber industry does more environmental damage each year than all our CO2 has ever done(that is, a quantifiable amount). Carbon dioxide is one of the weakest greenhouse gases(and is near its saturation point), far surpassed by things like methane and water vapor(which aren’t). It’s just the left’s current boogeyman.

Great story! This demonstrates what statisticians have said for decades: you must approach statistics with sound theory first! The postage stamp / GW model is an example of spurious correlation and the world is full of them. There is a simple statistical test to identify them. You take the first differences of each variable and regress them. The correlation will be weaker, but if it’s still significant then you know it’s not spurious. But generally, logic is a better guide.

Here is another correlation:

Ego-driven interventionism has increased dramatically as the number of Keynesians in academia increased.

In other words, propaganda and indoctrination works! We all know that but what is always left behind by the ego-driven interpreters and the ego-driven interventionists is ethics!

Libertarians don’t gain any credibility by promoting this kind of un-scientific pap. I would expect this kind of silliness from conservatives (who think “I’d rather be waterboarding” T-shirts are the pinnacle of hilarity), but expect better of my fellow libertarians.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462

Yes, there are doomsayers who exaggerate and plenty of statists licking their lips at the opportunity. But the market is already at work solving the problem.

Cork,

I actually never had a problem with understanding science, nor in understanding the principles of science. Always had the highest scores and got 100s on all science regents except one where I got a 99, and that was due to marking in the wrong multiple choice circle, not because I didn’t know the correct answer.

Global warming fear mongers have run science off the rails and this mocking article actually has bite. One of the continual mistakes that AGW believers make is confusing statistical correlation with causation. They deserve to be mocked.

In case you didn’t get it the article never claimed that postage stamp prices were NOT increasing. Nor did it claim that temperatures weren’t rising.

AGW proponents have made far worse mistakes than merely being confused about correlations. They’ve make many extremely serious errors that calls their entire credibility into question.

As an example the use of tree rings as a proxy for global temperature measurement. Especially in light of the fact that the tree ring measurements do not correlate with known local temperatures, and the fact that the dendrochronologists themselves claim the rings are NOT suitable as temperature proxies because of multiple factors.

It is even further embarrassing to climatologists when they produce reports that use such proxies, and many other proxies for temperature, but only get statistically significant correlations against tree ring data, with none of the other proxies showing the chicken little levels of correlation to CO2 levels that tree rings provide.

It is even more embarrassing that the climatologists failed to tell the people they are scaring to death that CO2 is one of the main limiting factor on plant growth. The mere increase in CO2 alone, according to dendrochronologists can account for increased tree ring growth over the past hundred years.

But don’t you listen to the actual scientists with the most expertise in the area of tree rings. No keep listening to Mann, and his embarrassingly fallacious arguments, deductions, and statistical mistakes.

Do you know how climatologists explain [away] the inconvenient fact that tree ring data doesn’t correlate to local temperatures but does correlate well [with coarse enough granularity] to [grossly] estimated global temperatures? They invented a spooky force not supported by any other data called temperature tele-connection.

The concept behind this idea of the tele-connect is that plants can tune into global temperatures bypassing local ones. Tell that to my tomatoes or dogwoods, when they get hit by a local frost. They shouldn’t freeze but instead should grow strong because somewhere in South America it got warmer.

The AGW alarmists are truly idiots. Have you seen the recent hysteria over polar bear cannibalism? Never crossed any of their minds that bears are naturally cannibalistic and in fact nothing has changed. In five minutes I found two instances of bear cannibalism that had hit the news. One as old as ninty years ago.

Likewise their panics about glacial melts. Never mind that the melting glaciers are exposing trees that grew during the Roman warm period, thousands of years before the industrial age.

This scare is going to be looked back upon as the worst case of science fraud ever to have occurred in history. Far worse than piltdown man and an embarrassment to those how have jumped on the bandwagon merely to gain public funding.

Climatologists are violating as many good principles of science as they can get away with. They fail to keep proper records, do not make the records they do keep public, do not present their methodologies in there published papers, cross peer review, do not use peer review from statistical and other experts, allow political oversight of their committees, argue based on consensus, call for imprisonment of their scientific opponents, etc.

Actually, I thought the article was amusing, even though I think that the scientific case for anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is stronger than the case against it.

(All causes, no matter how serious, need to be poked fun at from time to time.)

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter if the theory of AGW is correct, because governments of the world are going to act on the assumption that it is correct.

The effort of Austrian economists would be much better spent illustrating, say, why we should be building nuclear fission power plants instead of windmills, instead of mocking the inevitable (the recognition of the atmosphere as a global commons and CO2 as a pollutant).