First, Armstrong and Green contend that agreement among forecasters is not related to accuracy—and may reflect bias as much as anything else. “You don’t vote,” Armstrong told me. “That’s not the way science progresses.”

Next, they say the complexity of the global warming problem makes forecasting a fool’s errand. “There’s been no case in history where we’ve had a complex thing with lots of variables and lots of uncertainty, where people have been able to make econometric models or any complex models work,” Armstrong told me. “The more complex you make the model the worse the forecast gets.”

Finally, Armstrong and Green write that the forecasts do not adequately account for the uncertainty intrinsic to the global warming problem. In other words, they are potentially overconfident.

When a prediction about a complex phenomenon is expressed with a great deal of confidence, it may be a sign that the forecaster has not thought through the problem carefully, has overfit his statistical model, or is more interested in making a name for himself than in getting at the truth.

Excerpt From: Silver, Nate. “The Signal and the Noise.” Penguin Group, USA, 2012-09-05. iBooks.

This material may be protected by copyright.

Check out this book on the iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-signal-and-the-noise/id520233773?mt=11

HKO

Nate Silver does not discount global warming but applies the same analysis to the difficulty and mistakes that arise from using complex models to predict from unlimited data that he applied to predicting earthquakes, economic collapses, and terrorist attacks.

What is often missing from such predictions is not the lack of facts or data but the lack of imagination.   It is what Donald Rumsfeld referred to as the unknown unknowns.  We consider the possibilities we can think of and we are ultimately surprised by the possibilities we did not think of .  The more that politics are involved and other agendas take priority the more we are surprised by the possibilities we did not consider.

In a country so protected from foreign invasion we thought the threat at Pearl Harbor was from sabotage and collected the fleet and the planes in a confined space to better protect them- a fatal lack of imagination.  We experienced similar failures on 9/11.

Complex simulations tend to give a very false sense of security.  We consistently fail to consider the probabilities of failure and success.  On Wall Street a philosophical understanding of risk was replaced with delusional mathematical certainty. Economic predictions are made with a certainty that often confounds policy.  The more data we have the more noise we also collect.

It is that ability to distinguish signal from noise that is essential for better predictions.

Harry Bradford write at The Huffington Post Al Gore Worth 50 Times More Than He Was As Vice President

Excerpt:

The author of An Inconvenient Truth has swelled his net worth to about $100 million, largely due to his investments in green energy, after being worth less than $2 million during his time as Vice President, The Washington Post reports.

Gore isn’t the only one who’s betting on green energy. The United States invested $51 billion in renewable energy in 2011 , second only to China in a year where green investments hit a record high.

He also has to thank the Obama administration’s 2009 stimulus package. The $80 to $90 billion worth of government investment in green energy has helped to grow many of the companies Gore and his renewable energy-based hedge fund Generation Investment Management have put the majority of their money in. In fact, nine of 11 companies that Gore endorsed during a 2008 presentation on fighting climate change received government investment, WaPo reports.

Lorrie Goldstein writes in The Toronto Sun, Green ‘drivel’ exposed – The godfather of global warming lowers the boom on climate change hysteria, 6/23/12.

Excerpts:

Having observed that global temperatures since the turn of the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based climate models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, “the problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.” Now, Lovelock has given a follow-up interview to the UK’s Guardian newspaper in which he delivers more bombshells sure to anger the global green movement, which for years worshipped his Gaia theory and apocalyptic predictions that billions would die from man-made climate change by the end of this century.

Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas emissions, but says it’s now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect.

He responds to attacks on his revised views by noting that, unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government funding if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he’s never been afraid to revise his theories in the face of new evidence. Indeed, that’s how science advances.

HKO comments:

A scientist changes his theory when it conflicts with reality.  A political ideologue tries to change the reality.  Changing reality requires the heavy hand of a government authority.

Lovelock also notes the reality that few of the climate ideologues wish to face. They accuse those who dispute them for being  interests of the energy companies.  Besides the fact that many of the energy companies support climate ideologues because it thins the herd of their competition, the ideologues also refuse to admit the being paid by the government to find proof of anthropomorphic global warming does not also distort their findings.

In The American,  Lee Harris writes Science and the Republican Brain,  4/30/12.

Excerpts:

This is certainly tempting, but there is a serious problem with classifying all crackpots as anti-science. More than once in the history of science, the crackpot of one generation has been hailed as a visionary by the next. Indeed, during the seminal period marked by a major paradigm shift, it is often impossible to distinguish the pseudo-scientific crackpot from the genuine scientific revolutionary.

Conservatives wouldn’t be conservatives if they liked change; liberals wouldn’t be liberal unless they did. This neatly explains why conservatives hate to change their minds, while liberals simply love to. Indeed, some liberals have changed their minds on so many issues so often that they finally got sick and tired of it all and have turned into conservatives from simple exhaustion.

It would be unfair to say that only liberals (or Democrats) are taken in by the extravagant claims of Mr. Scientific Truth, but the moment you hear someone attacked for being anti-science, you can be certain that the person making this charge is a true believer in the teachings of that rank charlatan, Mr. Scientific Truth. Belief in the infallibility of the latest scientific consensus may be useful in the process of learning about science when we are children, but the history of science teaches us that the scientific consensus of today is no more immune to future scientific revolutions than the scientific consensus of the past. To label as anti-science anyone who is skeptical of the current scientific consensus may be a clever political stunt, but it betrays a hopelessly naïve idea of the nature of science. The real enemy of science is not the skeptic, but the true believer.

HKO comments:

When fundamentalists refute evolution with creationism they merit the scorn of being anti-science.  Religion has value in proposing how to live and behave, but science is much better at determining how things work, and the nature of matter and energy.

Being anti-science,  however, should not apply to skepticism towards scientific consensus, as long as the skepticism has a rational and scientific basis.  Republicans and others are too often deemed intellectually lacking for credible refutation of climate change.  But the language of those who defend the consensus is so polluted politically that they sound more like religious zealots, true believers, than open minded scientists.

It is a mistake to equate creationists and climate skeptics.  Politics mixes as poorly with science as it does with religion.

Cherry Blossoms Blooming in Macon

William Happer writes in the Wall Street Journal, Global Warming Models Are Wrong Again, 3/26/12

Excerpt:

It is easy to be confused about climate, because we are constantly being warned about the horrible things that will happen or are already happening as a result of mankind’s use of fossil fuels. But these ominous predictions are based on computer models. It is important to distinguish between what the climate is actually doing and what computer models predict. The observed response of the climate to more CO2 is not in good agreement with model predictions.

We need high-quality climate science because of the importance of climate to mankind. But we should also remember the description of how science works by the late, great physicist, Richard Feynman:

“In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience; compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.”

HKO comments:

At the risk of repeating what has been often written in this blog, the tone of the debate too often takes on the language of religious fanaticism rather than science.  When a theory conflicts with facts the scientists adjust the theory, the ideologue tries to adjust reality. That is the cause of much of the tyranny caused by moral supremacists.

I am no scientists but there is a debate on this issue. Perhaps there is global warming, but it sure was a pretty weekend.

What One Eats in Macon After Viewing the Cherry Blossoms