Every once in a while there are two pieces of news that fit together so well that it seems intentional. Often it's just the Mainstream media trying to coordinate an attack on Republicans. This time I don't think they are really working together despite the interesting results at the confluence of these two stories.
My friend Tim sent me news of this horrendous judgment in San Francisco:
A federal judge here said environmental groups and four U.S. cities can sue federal development agencies on allegations the overseas projects they financially back contribute to global warming.
The decision Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White is the first to say that groups alleging global warming have a right to sue.
"This is the first decision in the country to say that climate change causes sufficient injury to give a plaintiff standing, to open the courthouse door," said Ronald Shems, a Vermont attorney representing Friends of the Earth.
That group, in addition to Greenpeace and the cities of Boulder, Colo., Santa Monica, Oakland and Arcata, Calif., sued Overseas Private Investment Corp. and the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Those government agencies provide loans and insure billions of dollars of U.S. investors' money for development projects overseas. Many of the projects are power plants that emit greenhouses gases that the groups allege cause global warming.
This piece comes to us from NewScientist.com:
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. ...
Surprisingly, Ioannidis says another predictor of false findings is if a field is "hot", with many teams feeling pressure to beat the others to statistically significant findings.
What do we see when we look at both of these stories at the same time? A San Francisco judge allowing people to sue because they allege that greenhouse gasses cause global warming; a "hot field" like global warming which has produced widely questioned "results"; a study which indicates that scientific research papers have less than a 50% chance of being true, especially in a hot field.
What do we see?
A judge using bad science, pushed by activists with an ax to grind, to make bad decisions about issues no one has a firm grip on.
Update: Over at The Corner Iain Murray noticed the article about scientific accuracy, and makes a connection to the environmental movement, too.
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