Chris,
I *do* hope you're not falling into the trap of believing statements and conclusions made by a corporate-sponsored study on AGW! After all, we all know how misleading and worthless all those Exxon-supported studies were (hint: they reached the 'wrong' conclusion). After all, it is widely accepted and acknowledged that scientific research is only valid when it is funded by government taxation, and never by private business concerns. That would be another Proof by Consensus, right? ;-)
You - honestly and very correctly - touched on the subject but I'll step out and say it plainly - I seriously doubt Deutsche Bank believes or even cares about carbon footprints and impacts on the environment. What they *really* want is an opportunity to make gobs money buying and selling an imaginary product ('carbon credits') that world-wide consumers / taxpayers will be forced to purchase. Being a skeptic (aka heretic), I doubt their 'study' has *any* other purpose - if there was a program to buy/sell 'Whale Credits', they'd discover a sudden urge to 'protect this noble and intelligent species'. Regardless, yet-another survey of scientists and opinions proves nothing (Argument by Authority, again).
But I *could* be wrong. I'll read the 51-page PDF and respond soon... we'll see.
- Steve
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A very interesting comment by Jerry Pournelle on our reliance upon the accuracy of temperature measurements to 0.1 degree...
ReplyDelete"Getting data more accurate than your primary instrument can deliver in a single observation requires some assumptions (or data) about the distribution of the errors that makes your instrument inaccurate and untrustworthy. Is it the eyesight of the observer? Can that be corrected with spectacles? Are these observations independent of each other?
I have a bathroom scale that gives me digital data to the nearest 0.5 pound. It does its own rounding and I don't know how it does it. If I weigh myself every morning after breakfast and write all those numbers down for a year, then add them up and divide by 365, will I now know my average weight to 0.01 pounds? Is that my "true" weight for the year? If I make a chart with the 5 year running average of my "annual weight", do I know more if I display it accurate to the nearest 0.1 pounds, or will charting to the nearest pound be sufficiently informative? If my weight decreased by 0.1 pounds a year for the past five years do I worry about starving to death?"
Just his thoughts, but interesting nonetheless.
- Steve
Sure, Deutsche Bank sees global warming as a way to make money, plain and simple. However, their investment strategies - as stated - are based on what they percieve to be long term trends. If AGW is a passing fad or a theory in crisis, no investor of DB's caliber is going to put 6 or 7 billion of its assets at risk on it.
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