Jim was also dismayed at the evident inability of nearly all reporters, some lawmakers, and a wide swath of the public to grasp the notion of randomness. The media had so garbled the message he had tried to deliver the previous year – juxtaposing his waffling quote with images of the drought, for example – that he realized “that many people would misunderstand it the next time the temperature in a given season was colder than normal, in which case the attention drawn to the greenhouse effect may have done more harm than good.” “So I made up a set of large colored dice. The dice for the 1951 to 1980 period, which I used to define normal climate, had two red, two white, and two blue sides, representing unusually warm, average, and unusually cool seasons, respectively. The second dice represented our model calculations of how greenhouse warming should alter these probabilities in the 1990s. It had four red sides, one white, and one blue. The point I wanted to make was that even though climate fluctuates chaotically, greenhouse warming should load the climate dice enough for the informed layman to notice an increase in the frequency of warmer than normal seasons.” He used these dice in television appearances for about a year. Bowen, M. (2008) Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the truth of Global Warming. New York: Dutton, pp.226-7
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 09:22:44 +0000
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