Posted by
Andrews on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 1:43:29 PM
I wrote before about the "hockey stick" graph, but beyond its use as a tool in the global warming argument, I never really thought it had a political relevance. However, with Obama now displaying the same error that the hockey stick graph does, I see that perhaps the hockey stick is symptomatic of a particular mindset, a mindset which sees the past as stable and refuses to allow that a present "crisis" may be nothing more than one more bump along the road.
For those unfamiliar with the "hockey stick" graph, it is a graph supposedly showing global mean temperatures over the past 1000 years. It shows essentially unchanging temperatures from about 1000 AD until about 1900, at which point it soars upward. The methodology, both in determining historical temperatures and int he mathematical methods, has been well and thoroughly debunked (see links below), but even before reading those essays, I knew the graph was absurd. How? Because of the "Medieval Warm Period". At that time Vikings colonized parts of Greenland now under snow and ice (and later recorded the advance of snow which eventually ended those colonies), towns were built in the Alps which are now covered in glaciers, and so on and so on. That alone proved to me the world was once warmer than it is now, and in historical times. The flat line of the chart, always well below present temperatures, simply does not fit the historical record.
And the same error is evident in the statements of Obama that our present economy is the worst since the Great Depression. Apparently, in Obama's mind there was the Great Depression, then a long stretch where nothing much happened, and then our present crisis. Much like the hockey stick, all variation is removed form the past, and certainly any problems worse than we have today. Gone are the inflation and price controls of Nixon, Carter's "stagflation", the 81-82 recession, the S&L collapse, the dot com crash, and the mild recession of 2001. All that disappears and we are left with the "worst economy since the Depression".
And why does this happen? Why do so many forget all of history? Why turn it into a flat, featureless plain until the present moment? Well, because it makes the crisis seem all the more dramatic. Whether global warming or an economic downturn, if the past was relatively bland and unchanging, then the present "crisis" seems all the more dire.
And why does no one challenge these assertions? Well some do not out of partisan solidarity, but they are the minority. Most, however, do not challenge these assertions because they simply do not know any better. In the case of the hockey stick, most people have little awareness of climate history, nor of those events, such as the colonization of Greenland, which provide evidence that the chart is misleading.
But Obama's claims? Well, in this case there are two reasons. First, many who listen to him are too young to remember the big problems of Carter and the early 80's. Some may not even remember distinctly the S&L crash, or even the dot com crash. (After all Obama attracts a lot of votes from 18-22, who were not even in their teens for the dot com crash.) The rest may be engaging in that strange telescoping to which humans are prone, seeing the present problem as larger and the past problems as smaller, due to proximity. (It is the flip side of seeing the past as better than it was.) And so no one challenges his absolutely absurd claim that our current situation is worse than the Carter years and that somehow our handful of bank failures is more of a crisis than the collapse of a majority of the S&Ls.
So we need to remain wary of any claims about situations being the "worst ever". Very often such claims only hold up if we adopt a willful blindness about the realities of the past. And if we refuse to do so, often we will realize that we, or our predecessors, weathered worse in the past and emerged unscathed without the many solutions demanded by those who falsify the historical record.
POSTSCRIPT
These are the links relating to the "hockey stick" graph and related statistical errors:
Very Quick and Simple Logic
Fire Up the SUV
Some Global Warming Links
Statistical Artifacts
The World's Most Stupid Bureaucrat
Sampling Changes and Fictional Trends
Once Again, Confused by Our Own Data
There are many links in those articles pointing to external sources which provide much more information than I do, so please check them out.