WALTER RUSSELL MEAD SHOULD STICK TO GREEK TRANSLATION

According to his one page bio at the Council on Foreign Relations, he won a prize for "the translation of New Testament Greek" and like the Greeks, he's not much of a statistician, as you can tell from this passage in one of his denialist articles about global warming:

What? There is no statistically significant evidence of global warming for the last fourteen years, and the debate over global warming is not over in the opinion of “the vast majority of climate scientists?

Mead is referring to this exchange in the BBC interview of Prof. Phil Jones:

B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

For Mead's sake and those who believe him, we need to define "statistical significance." Generally, a finding is statistically significant if it was due to chance less than 1 time out of 20. In scientific journals, this is usually expressed by writing "p <0.05" where "p" is the probability of the result being due to chance alone. Prof. Jones does not state what exactly "quite close" means but in psychology we used to mean between 1 in 20 and 1 in 10. In other words, there's at least a 90% chance that the trend is real and not a fluke.