In article ,
martin wrote:
On Sun, 21 Aug 2005 10:22:36 +0100, "michael adams"
wrote:
"martin" wrote in message
. ..

Call me a naive crackpot, but I'd chose Nick in preference to any
journalist.

Or perhaps yourself and your Crackpot Master McLaren will now want
to accuse the BBC of lying, and putting words in people's mouths
as well ?

The BBC quite frequently get things wrong, especially technical and
scientific subjects. For every expert with an opinion on weather
trends there are 10 other experts with differing opinions.

Actually, the REAL experts tend to have ten opinions each, and simplify
to one only when talking to journalists and lecturing to undergraduates :-)

I remember when "the father of climatology" was forecasting that
another ice age was imminent.

Yup. I remember that, too.

That was, indeed, an aspect of the cyclemania that I was referring to.

It is only about 50 years since statisticians realised that most data
that appears to follow cycles actually doesn't, because the feedback
effects are of the sort that do not create regular or predictable
patterns. And the belief in cycles is still widespread in many
sciences, despite decades of the best people pointing out that the
data are clearly incompatible with a true cyclic model.

Interestingly, one of the things that keeps cyclemania alive is the
deficiency of the English language in not having a term for the sort
of irregular variation caused by non-cyclic feedback effects. The
nearest term is, indeed, "cycle" but that immediately gets people
thinking in terms of regular, predictable variation. Think of this
the next time anyone talks about the economy ....


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.