Understanding the Times
Issachar vs. the Scribes, Revisited (2)
By Calvin Kalsbeek
“And of the children of Issachar, which were men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do; the heads of them were two hundred; and all their brethren were at their commandment.”
http://www.rfpa.org/sb/TheStandardBeare ... OCValue4=0
Another example of questionable use of statistics involves the global warming debate. The July 24, 2006 Los Angeles Times featured an op-ed by Naomi Oreskes, a social scientist at the University of California San Diego and the author of a 2004 Science Magazine study. Oreskes insisted that a review of 928 scientific papers showed there was 100% consensus that global warming was not caused by natural climate variations. This study was featured in Al Gore’s film, which portrayed future disastrous consequences of global warming: “An Inconvenient Truth.” Apparently there is a problem with Oreskes’ study, however. In a critique by British social scientist Benny Peiser, we learn that the Science Magazine analysis excluded nearly 11,000 (more than 90%) of the papers dealing with global warming. Also pointed out was that less than 2% of the climate studies in the survey actually endorsed the so-called “consensus view” that human activity is driving global warming and some of the studies actually opposed that view.4
Statistics indeed! The only question for the discerning reader to determine is “Are they being used to reveal the truth or something quite different?”