Monday, December 18, 2006

Farewell Greenpeace


I've just resigned my membership of Greenpeace.
Why, you may ask, did you join?
Because I thought that, on balance they were a force for good in a predatory and over-politicised world.
Then, like any other direct-debit membership, it's very easy to let things slide after you realise that you've made a mistake.
I meant to resign last year and (I think) the year before, but somehow it just didn't happen.
I had an interesting discussion about climate change when I did finally 'phone them to cancel my membership. It went like this:

"I want to resign because I'm appalled by your campaign on climate change".
"But we've been doing it for years"
"It's your recent comments and tactics which have revealed you as totally biased"
"We just say what the intergovernmental panel on climate change says."
"But they don't know any statistics"
"?"
"This sort of stuff is based on interpreting very ambiguous data; to do that you need expert statisticians to at least help the `scientists'. None of this climate change stuff has been done by statisticians. The chairman of the American Statistical Association said in his report on the hockey-stick not only that the UN’s 2001 temperature reconstruction "had used inappropriate statistical methods and data" but also that many of the supporting scientific papers, both before and after the 2001 report, had been "written by a small and closely-connected group of palaeoclimatologists, who effectively dominated their field worldwide, and were all intimately linked to the principal author of the UN’s 2001 graph."
"Well, we trust the IPCC".

So there you go. It's like shopping for pears. Pick the ones you like the look of. If they're rotten inside, well that's too bad

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