Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Coming to the right conclusion

I've been reading Alison Weir's excellent "The Six Wives of Henry VIII" and just recently I read about Anne Boleyn's first pregnancy which eventually produced Elizabeth I. Henry VIII desperately wanted a male heir to the throne and expected his new wife would produce a boy. The royal house consulted soothsayers and astrologers about the sex of the baby.
Only one dared predict it would not be a boy: William Glover, famous throughout the kingdom for foretelling the future, told Anne he had a vision of her bearing 'a woman child...." This was not well received.
Over a Pajamas Media, Charles Martin explains "Reasons to be a global warming skeptic." If you're a researcher, that's where the money is:
The predictions of further warming are necessarily based on models. Now, it happens I did my PhD work on Federally funded modeling, from which I developed the NBSR Law (named after the group for which I worked): All modeling efforts will inevitably converge on the result most likely to lead to further funding.

Anyone with a unbiased eye who looks into it will find any number of people who have found that a model that predicts more warming gets funded; a model that predicts relatively less warming gets less funding. Pre-tenure researchers in particular are warned away from results that don’t fit orthodoxy.
There's much more to make you relieved that Al Gore lost the Presidency.

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