Numbers Prove Plenty. And Accurate Quotation is good too

The Monitoring Department reports

On a brief patrol of the Twittersphere, I found my name being linked with the words ‘numbers prove nothing’. I could see this wasn’t intended to enhance my already pretty low reputation among the left-wing electronic mob which inhabits that twilit zone.

What was this about? Twitter, by its nature, doesn’t lend itself to detailed argument or presentation of facts.

As an experiment here, I am going to summarise what follows :"Peter Hitchens does not believe that 'Numbers Prove Nothing' . But he does believe very strongly in accurate and careful quotation".

Let's start with the alleged quotation ‘ numbers prove nothing’, it’s rather important how and where the words appeared. There are indeed occasions on which this would be true. The fact that millions of people supported the Iraq war didn’t make it right. The fact that millions of people believe in man-made global warming doesn’t make it true. Scientific theories are not resolved or proved by opinion polls or majorities, but by experimentation and above all by their testable power to predict.

But there are other occasions when numbers obviously do matter, not least when data are being examined. I use them a lot myself, and if I didn’t think they mattered at all, what would be the point of my spending weeks obtaining, and then publicising (for instance)  the astonishing figures on the numbers of people let off for illegally possessing cannabis?

So I wondered when and where I had used this phrase. I trawled the Internet, with my limited skills, and came up with two references (I’d be grateful to anyone who can do better).

I found, in essence, two (the others were repeats) Neither was sourced. Neither was complete or had any useful context:

Here they are:
I reproduce them exactly as they are displayed. The material begins and finishes with a line of asterisks

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There is still 'no evidence' to support global warming. All the existing scientific data are 'suppositions, allegations, predictions. Numbers prove nothing'

Peter Hitchens column in the Mail on Sunday

Found at http:/www.epa.gov/airnow/2006 conference/Sunday/maybe

Alternatively:

PETER HITCHENS
Peter Hitchens, like Melanie Phillips a provocative right wing journalist, is keen to promote denial arguments. In his column in the Mail on Sunday he claimed that there is still 'no evidence' to support global warming. In a reply to a complaint about this article he reiterated that all the existing scientific data are 'suppositions, allegations, predictions. Numbers prove nothing'

To be found at http://risingtide.org.uk/content/hall-shame

 

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I then searched the Mail on Sunday’s electronic library for anything by me mentioning the word ‘warming’ and simultaneously mentioning the word ‘evidence’.  I seldom write about global warming anyway, and the only article I could find in which I made a substantial reference to it was this review of Christopher Booker’s book ‘The Real Global Warming Disaster’ , published on 29th November 2009.

‘AS IT happens I was Green before the word came to mean what it does now. From a very early age, I hated the ploughing up of this country for the motor car, and grieved at the mad closure of the railways, a view that has now become much more widespread than it was then. I began bicycling to work before bike lanes had been invented, when Boris Johnson was still at Eton.

To this day I get a sort of red mist when I see great trees being cut down by over-cautious councils, and I gaze with limitless regret on the bleak prairies of Southern England, where hedgerows once grew. If I can take a ship and a train rather than a plane, I will do.

So it's no use trying to dismiss me as some kind of petrolhead polluter who wants to cover the planet with runways and motorways, nor to allege I'm in the pay of Big Oil, when I say that I doubt the existence of man-made global warming. I just doubt it because I am not convinced it's true. Actually, now that Big Oil has bought into the man-made warming scare itself, I generally get even cruder abuse, being called a 'denier' as if I were some kind of Nazi. And if I mention my doubts at public occasions, I can feel the swelling wrath of the unreasoning mob gathering against me.

There's seldom time to make more than a few points before you are howled down by righteous zealots. And that is why I, and anyone seriously interested in this subject, owes a great debt to Christopher Booker, who has set down all the arguments for doubt in a single, concise book that will no doubt be either ignored or abused.

IT WOULD be very sad if, as a result, it fails to reach a wide audience. I think anyone remotely concerned about this huge controversy should read this courageous piece of work. I am not asking you to agree with everything in it, or assuming that you will. I am asking any reasonable person, who is influenced by facts and logic, to consider the case made here.

If you have had doubts but suppressed them for fear of being drowned in anger or contempt, buy this book to arm yourself. If you know any global-warming fanatics, buy it for them for Christmas and ask them, even beg them, to study it carefully. At the very least, it should allow the debate on this subject to be conducted with more fairness and without such expressions as 'denier' being used.

What you will find out is this. That much of what passes for accepted truth is not. Facts have been ruthlessly twisted, suppressed or invented. Scientists are greatly divided on the subject. Many people - and bodies - presented as experts actually have little or no knowledge of the science involved. Gullible politicians and gullible media men and women have repeatedly fallen for it. Hucksters, profiteers, world-government fanatics and, of course, the EU (always searching for an excuse to increase its power) have latched on to it. Huge public subsidies, including the carbon-trading racket and the tragicomic building of hideous, worse-than-useless windfarms, now depend upon it.

But take, just for example, the famous picture of polar bears on a melting ice-floe, supposedly doomed victims of global warming. The USA's ex-Vice President, the propagandist Al Gore, got audiences going 'Aaah!' by saying the bears had 'nowhere else to go'. Really? The picture was taken in August, when the Alaskan ice always melts. The polar bears were fine. Think about it. They can swim and they weren't far from land. Recent studies show that most polar bear populations are rising.

The world was warmer than it is now in the early Middle Ages, long before industrial activity increased CO2 output, a fact that the warming fanatics have worked very hard to obscure. Oh, and the most important greenhouse gas by far is not CO2 but water vapour, which is not influenced by human activity at all.

Meanwhile, an English court of law (despite buying the CO2 argument) has identified nine significant errors of fact in Gore's Oscar-winning alarmist film An Inconvenient Truth, ludicrously being inflicted on children in British schools. Among these: sea levels are not going to rise by 20ft any time soon; there's no evidence that atolls in the Pacific have been evacuated because of rising waters; the Gulf Stream is not going to shut down; the drying-up of Lake Chad, the shrinking of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro and Hurricane Katrina were none of them caused by global warming; the only polar bears that have drowned were four that died in a storm.

BOOKER also reminds us that even if all the measures demanded by the warming zealots were put into action, according to their own calculations this would only delay the effects they fear by six years. In my experience, people who employ alarmism, and who turn with rage on their critics, do so because they lack confidence in their case. Watch their behaviour at the coming Copenhagen climate conference, a festival of panic and exaggerated woe.

This particular frenzy, if not checked, could end by bankrupting the West and leaving us sitting in the cold and the dark whistling for a wind to power our dead computers - while China and India surge on to growth and prosperity because they have had the sense to ignore the whole stupid thing.’

 

I should say, by the way, that this sums up my views on man-made global warming quite well.

Then I searched for the words ‘numbers don’t matter’ . The library came back with nothing written by me which contained these words. When I tried ‘numbers’ by itself, it came back with 300 references in 11 years, which suggests that I take numbers seriously.

The quotation including the words ‘ suppositions, allegations and predictions. Numbers prove nothing’  is said by the second source not to have come from a column ( as it doesn't seem to do, though even electronic libraries can be mistaken) but to have come from a 'reply' (undated and without any traceable reference) to a complaint. The library certainly can't find it, in any form, under my byline.

Without more information, I cannot attempt to verify this. What complaint? By whom? To whom? When? But I would be glad if the anonymous person who produced this quotation would give the context, without which its burden is unclear. In the meantime, I would urge anyone who is seduced by the claim that I think 'Numbers don't matter' as a general proposition should view the suggestion with caution. Numbers do matter, in general. And accurate quotation matters just as much, as I pointed out to the BBC some weeks ago.