Regarding climate change letters by Leonie McGuire and Harry Creamer on February 24 2017:
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There are simply too many letters to the Port News espousing the view that global warming and/or climate change is settled science. Such conclusions are scientifically and factually impossible. Here's why:
Any one who understands statistics knows that statistics reach conclusions based on derivatives from samples of the statistical population to be measured. The larger the sample relative to the population, the greater the likelihood that you can have confidence in the conclusion. (the word "population" in this circumstance means data points)
It is simply impossible, (not hard, not difficult), but absolutely impossible to conclude that we have "global warming" or even its new incarnation "climate change" and certainly completely impossible to declare that it is human based.
Our planet Earth is 4.6 billion years old. (yes, "B" for billion). Competent human climate and weather records have been kept for, at most, 150 years.
Trying to extrapolate a conclusion about our climate based on that sample size relative to the actual population being measured provides a .00000003 chance that any factual conclusion can be drawn from the data. (Almost the same could be said even if we had precise weather records going back 10,000 years.)
I am neither a climate change advocate nor a climate change denier. I am simply someone who looks to the facts and it just seems to me that we have way too many folks in tie dye shirts and sandals trying to convince us that we should castrate the the greatest prosperity producing system of free enterprise and industry that the world has ever seen, while at the same time relying on the flimsiest statistical evidence possible.
Maybe we do have climate change but it is just as likely, if not more so, that we have had tens of thousands of similar natural increases and decreases in temperature and weather activity over just the past million years, not to mention the past 4 billion. Lets stop the fear mongering and bring the some rational thought to the discussion.
Dr. Tom McAndrews (retired)