Niche Modeling

Suicides increase due to reading atrocious global warming research papers.

Read it and weep — from W.M. Briggs, Statistician.

The whole point of this gibberish is to say, “We could not find a signal before we manipulated our data, nor could we find it after we manipulated it twice successively. But were were finally able to produce what we were looking for by throwing out the points that did not fit our needs.”

Only after they tossed the data (and after the manipulations) were they able to get publishable p-values. And not too many either: they only found a relationship in a couple of months and really only in males. As cheaters they stink. But not entirely. They did (12 + 4)*2 = 32 separate tests (one for each month and season once per sex), and they should have adjusted their p-values up to account for the multiple chances for success. They did not. Well, no time be ethical now. If they did adjust, their findings would vanish.

The only question I have is: did they cheat knowingly or were they so anxious to justify their fears of global warming that they actually believed that anything they could do to the data would be a service to humanity? Sigh. Probably the later.