Rush Limbaugh takes on those who say President Bush is causing global warming, which in turn caused Hurricane Katrina:
CALLER: Rush, you called it on global warming. NBC last night. (pause) Rush?
RUSH: We have the sound bite of that, too. Mike, grab audio sound bite #5. I wasn't even going into get this, this was so ridiculous, but since you brought it up and it was a See, I Told You So, here is NBC science correspondent Robert Bazell and his report on the hurricane last night.
BAZELL (Breathlessly): Even with a slight weakening, Katrina was one of the biggest ever, and many scientists say we can expect such storms more often, as global warming increases sea temperatures, around the worldRUSH: Now, once something like this gets going, folks, there's no stopping it. It's got an inertia of its own, but it isn't true. Hurricane expert Max Mayfield at the National Hurricane Center says it has nothing to do with this. This is part of a normal cycle (story). If you want, I can go get lists for you of the most deadly hurricanes this century, and I can tell you how there are hurricanes long before anybody thought of man made global warming, that had just as much death and destruction as this. (The 1900 Galveston Storm) This is not unprecedented, but most people's historical perspective begins with the day they were born and they judge events within their own lifetime. "Well, it's never been as bad as this. Well, we've never had it as good as this." So to people who have never seen the category four hurricane, "Well, hey, it couldn't have been any worse than this, Rush! Why, it had to be global warming." No. These things have been happening since the beginning of time. There have been worse ones than this when there was nobody talking about global warming, when it hadn't even been created as a political football -- and I have this little story. I knew this is going to come up, so I had this at the top of the stack, right here, folks, and it comes from NewScientist.com. Brace yourselves.
"Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true. John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings. 'We should accept that most research findings will be refuted. Some will be replicated and validated. The replication process is more important than the first discovery,' Ioannidis says. In the paper, Ioannidis does not show that any particular findings are false. Instead, he shows statistically how the many obstacles to getting research findings right combine to make most published research wrong," and this is not an editorial opinion.
While obtaining my Masters degree at the University of South Dakota, I learned a thing or two about statistics. I remember one mistake that can be made with statistics, which is to make predictions beyond the relevant range. Here is the exact principle listed as a mistake of statistics:
linear projections made beyond the relevant range of the data
And this is the mistake that those who are projecting the current trend of temperatures beyond the data set they are using to make such prediction. The mistake is assuming that the data represents a straight line, when in reality is a curve. So this supports Limbaugh’s point that we are just in a cycle:
We're just in a cycle. We are in a cycle where these have happened before. We're in a sunspot cycle (story). The sun's activity may be a little bit more robust than usual. We can't stop that, either. We just have to accept that these things happen, but this incessant desire to blame ourselves on the part of the left, it's always the Blame-America-First Crowd, the blame the capitalists, blame progress, blame technological advancement. "We are the ones to blame for this." Bush is responsible for it because of the war in Iraq, Bush didn't care about Kyoto? It's absurd. It's all patently false, and yet where is the absurdity reported as fact front and center? On NBC. I'm telling you there's no difference between MoveOn.org, George Soros' groups, and the mainstream media in America today.
An unbiased media would also show the relevant range mistake being made by those who promote the global warming theory. The theory is not based on sound statistics, and therefore is just someone's opinion.
