Big Claims About Tiny Numbers
3 weeks agoWillis Eschenbach
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
[UPDATE: An alert commenter, Izaak Walton, notes below that I’d used 10e21 instead of 1e21. This means all my results were too large by a factor of 10 … I’ve updated all the numbers to fix my error. Mea maxima culpa. This is why I love writing for the web … my errors don’t last long.]
Our marvelous host, Anthony Watts, alerted me about a new paper yclept “New Record Ocean Temperatures and Related Climate Indicators in 2023“.
Of course, since I’m “the very model of a modern major general”, my first thought was “Is there gender balance among the authors as required by DEI?”. I mean, according to the seminal paper “Ocean sciences must incorporate DEI, scholars argue“, that’s a new requirement. Not balance by sex. Balance by gender.
However, it turns out that there are thirty-five authors of the new paper. I downloaded the citation. It says “Cheng, L., Abraham, J., Trenberth, K., Boyer, T., Mann, M., Zhu, J., Wang, F., Yu, F., Locarnini, R., Fasullo, J., Zheng, F., Li, Y., Zhang, B., Wan, L., Chen, X., Wang, D., Feng, L., Song, X., Liu, Y., Reseghetti, F., Simoncelli, S., Gouretski, V., Chen, G., Mishonov, A., Reagan, J., Von Schuckmann, K., Pan, Y., Tan, Z., Zhu, Y., Wei, W., Li, G., Ren, Q., Cao, L., Lu, Y.”
Ooogh … gonna be hard to determine their genders. Can’t just check their names, that would be transphobic. Have to contact each one and ask them about their sexual proclivities … that’ll go over well …
In addition, there’s a numerical problem with genders.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/01/15/big-claims-about-tiny-numbers/
