Magic Statistics

A grisly new ploy has been put into operation to lure young girls into emigrating from Eastern Europe and into the hands of sex traffickers.  It’s called “Happy Trafficking”, but there’s nothing happy about it.

Lia was lured by a "friend" from her native Moldova with promises of a job and a better life. But once in Turkey, those hopes were quickly replaced with fears for her life after the acquaintance turned her over to sex traffickers.

She'd been "betrayed" and unwittingly sold into a nightmare existence.

"I was humiliated, and I can't find the right words to describe the horrors I was going through," Lia told RFE/RL's Romania-Moldova Service after she'd managed to escape. "I took a bath every time I came across some water, hoping the soap could wash away all the pain from my body. There was not a single day without sexual abuse and threats."
. . .
The antitrafficking community — allying government officials, multinational organizations, and civil-society activists — fears that the prevalence of a tactic known as "happy trafficking" could extend the reach of traffickers and exacerbate the problem.

The method minimizes risks to organizers and maximizes profits in a sort of human pyramid scheme. It combines physical and psychological pressure with financial and other incentives to turn victims into proxy recruiters and, eventually, traffickers.

Traffickers agree to free some of their captives only if they entice friends or acquaintances in their home country to replace them.  Victims do all the dirty work.  This diabolical scheme is described as “happy” because captives seeking to be released must pretend to be happy with their job and circumstances and not let on that they have been compelled to work as prostitutes.

“Happy trafficking” is believed to have started in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, but has now spread to Central and Southeast Asia.

Worldwide, the illicit trade in humans brings in some $32 billion per year.  At any given time, an estimated 2.5 million people are victims of coerced prostitution and other forms of servitude.

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Dr Vincent Gray has been a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Expert Reviewers Panel since its inception.  A letter written by him to a fellow scientist has been posted on the internet, in which Dr Gray charges the IPCC with failing to respond adequately to his comments and questions.

In short, the IPCC is stonewalling one of its own experts.

I have been an "Expert Reviewer" for the IPCC right from the start and I have submitted a very large number of comments on their drafts. It has recently been revealed that I submitted 1,898 comments on the Final Draft of the current Report. Over the period I have made an intensive study of the data and procedures used by IPCC contributors throughout their whole study range. I have a large library of reprints, books and comments and have published many comments of my own in published papers, a book, and in my occasional newsletter, the current number being 157.
 
I began with a belief in scientific ethics, that scientists would answer queries honestly, that scientific argument would take place purely on the basis of facts, logic and established scientific and mathematical principles.
 
Right from the beginning I have had difficulty with this procedure. Penetrating questions often ended without any answer. Comments on the IPCC drafts were rejected without explanation, and attempts to pursue the matter were frustrated indefinitely.
 
Over the years, as I have learned more about the data and procedures of the IPCC I have found increasing opposition by them to providing explanations, until I have been forced to the conclusion that for significant parts of the work of the IPCC, the data collection and scientific methods employed are unsound. Resistance to all efforts to try and discuss or rectify these problems has convinced me that normal scientific procedures are not only rejected by the IPCC, but that this practice is endemic, and was part of the organisation from the very beginning. I therefore consider that the IPCC is fundamentally corrupt. The only "reform" I could envisage, would be its abolition.
 
I wonder whether I could summarize briefly some of the reasons why the scientific procedures followed by the IPCC are fundamentally unsound.

Dr Gray goes on to challenge the two core claims of the IPCC: that the globe is warming and that this global warming is attributable to increasing carbon dioxide emissions.

With regard to the first claim, that global warming is occurring, he points out something that basic statistical theory corroborates: There are no sound measures of Earth’s average temperature.

To start with the "global warming" claim. It is based on a graph showing that "mean annual global temperature" has been increasing.
 
This claim fails from two fundamental facts
 
1. No average temperature of any part of the earth's surface, over any period, has ever been made.
 
How can you derive a "global average" when you do not even have a single "local" average?
 
What they actually use is the procedure used from 1850, which is to make one measurement a day at the weather station from a maximum/minimum thermometer. The mean of these two is taken to be the average. No statistician could agree that a plausible average can be obtained this way. The potential bias is more than the claimed "global warming.
 
2. The sample is grossly unrepresentative of the earth's surface, mostly near to towns. No statistician could accept an "average" based on such a poor sample. It cannot possibly be "corrected"

It is an elementary principle of sample theory that one cannot use an unrepresentative sample to make inferences about the phenomenon under investigation.  The locations where thermometers are sited were not selected randomly—indeed, quite the opposite: they were selected for convenience.  Such a sample cannot form the basis for estimates of the planetary temperature.

Read the whole thing.

h/t: Greenie Watch

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