Hyperbole Hysteria

From John Stossel. [Link]

Paul Krugman on Treason! Emphasis added. [Link]

A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

And a clearheaded analysis of the MIT report Krugman was ranting about. [Link]

The MIT report authors predicted that, without massive government action, global warming could be twice as severe as previously forecast, and more severe than the official projections of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The MIT authors said their report is based in part on 400 runs of a computer model of the global climate and economic activity.

While the MIT group espouses lofty-sounding objectives to provide leadership with "independent policy analysis and public education in global environmental change," we found their procedures inconsistent with important forecasting principles. No more than 30% of forecasting principles were properly applied by the MIT modellers and 49 principles were violated. For an important problem such as this, we do not think it is defensible to violate a single principle.

For example, MIT forecasters should have shrunk forecasts of change in the face of uncertainty about predictions of the explanatory variables; in this case the variables postulated to influence temperatures. More generally, they should also have been conservative in this situation of high uncertainty and instability. They were not.

We recognize that judgement is required in rating forecasting procedures. Evidence for our principles, however, is in the form of findings from scientific experiments comparing reasonable alternative methods, and accepted practice (see link below).

So what's really wrong with the MIT report? The phrase "global environmental change" provides a clue. The group's objective implicitly rejects the possibility of no or unimportant change or, despite mention of uncertainties, the possibility of unpredictable change. People who do research on forecasting know that a forecast of "no change" can be hard, if not impossible, to beat in many circumstances. A forecast of no change does not mean that one should necessarily expect things not to vary. Such a forecast can be appropriate even when a great deal of change is possible but the direction, extent or duration is uncertain.

When one looks at long series of Earth's temperatures, one finds that they have gone up and down irregularly, over long and short periods, on all time scales from years to millennia. Moreover, science has not been able to tell us why. There is much uncertainty about past climate changes and about the strength and even direction of causal relationships. To wit, do warming temperatures result in more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or is it the other way round -- or maybe a bit of both? Does warming of the atmosphere result in negative or positive feedback from clouds? There are many more such questions without answers. All this strongly suggests that a no-change forecast is the appropriate benchmark long-term forecast.

The louder and more insistently they scream 'Do something now!', the more I think we should wait and see.