Michael Fumento

You might think so from all the high-fives in the media over a new study in Science magazine that claims, as one headline put it, "Study Links Hurricanes to Global Warming." But people who actually read the Science paper, like Dr. Patrick Michaels, research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, beg to differ. Mostly what the Science authors showed was how to play games with numbers: And the games weren't particularly sophisticated. The biggest trick was to begin counting hurricanes at 1970 instead of using data going all the way back to 1900 as my piece did. In most scientific circles, more data are considered better than less; longer timelines are considered superior to shorter ones. But when you're practicing advocacy science, the opposite applies.