Slashdot Mirror
Top Advisor To Australian Gov't Says Climate Change is a UN Conspiracy
An anonymous reader writes: Maurice Newman, the top business advisor to conservative Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, today published an opinion piece (paywalled) in which he claims, "It's a well-kept secret, but 95 per cent of the climate models ... have been found ... to be in error." He goes on to write "This is not about facts or logic. It's about a new world order under the control of the UN." While Newman's 'skeptical' views have long been on record, it's unclear when he came to believe in this vast global conspiracy. Last year, the Abbott government removed Australia's Emissions Trading Scheme, and recently gave $4 million in funding to contrarian Bjorn Lomberg, while cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from science across the country.
Deniers will apparently just claim that "95%" of science is bogus if it disagrees with their pre-determined world view, causing cognitive dissonance.
95% is the number they always 'quote', for some reason - presumably because they know it sounds daft to say 'I don't know how much, but I'm sure it's a lot'. Nice, round numbers like 95 don't often turn up as the result of a genuine investigation; real, statistical results are much more awkward, of course - for probabilitic reasons, actually: if you could potentially get any number between 0 and 100 as a result, with 2 decimals (which is quite common), then there are about 10000 possible outcomes, and any number would, on the outset, have a probability of just 10E-4 (this is where those who actually understand probability will come and correct me, no doubt).
Apart from that, he is actually right, although he underestimates the number: it should be 100%. All climate models are wrong, we know that. This is because we are dealing with science, where we make observations, construct a model to explain them, make predictions, find that we are not quite right, change the model, and so on. You can even make a joke about this: Scientists know their theories are not The Truth, and what do you call people that tell something that they know isn't true? Yes! All scientists are liars!! (OK, I didn't say it was a GOOD joke)
From http://www.smh.com.au/national...:
Newman has long sold himself as an intellectual maverick and independent thinker. "He gets mileage out of his climate scepticism," says a former senior Liberal. "It suits him to sustain it."
Newman's assertions - climate scientists call them "zombie arguments", because they keep on popping up - have all been comprehensively debunked, repeatedly and in detail, by national academies of science around the world, including the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the Royal Society of London and the Australian Academy of Science. Andy Pitman, a climate scientist from the University of NSW, tells me that, "Newman's arguments are so wrong they are inconsistent with some fundamental laws of physics."
They have not shown them to be wrong. They have shown them to be inaccurate. Nobody can predict a system as complex as weather and temperature with 100% accuracy.
And here I thought that climate != weather. It seems it only works the other way around.
Besides that, an inaccurate scientific prediction is wrong by definition, i.e. it cannot be used to prove anything.
When they take the current climate models and plug in the variables (solar insolation, atmospheric gas mix, albedo, etc.) appropriate to Venus, Mars and Titan they get results very close to the actual climates. In other words, the models have been tested and shown to be fairly accurate. Carl Sagan was able to do this with some of the first models back in the late 1970s, and the science and the modeling processes have only gotten better over the last four decades.
In reality, climate modeling has likely saved our civilization if not our entire species once already. It was while playing with those models that the 'Nuclear Winter', the result of a nuclear war, was discovered. Ronnie Raygun and his band of lunatics would likely have launched nukes against the Soviets in eastern Europe if it hadn't been conclusively demonstrated to them that there was no way for anyone to come out of it a winner.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Multiple studies have shown that the climate models are wrong.
So will you accept science, or is the cognitive dissonance giving you problems if it disagrees with your pre-determined world view?
George Box famously said (not an exact quote) "All models are wrong but some are useful."
Your 2nd cite to the Nature article does not support your argument that models are wrong. There are a lot of quasi-cyclical phenomena that are unpredictable ahead of time (with our current state of knowledge but maybe never) but that show up as emergent properties with random timing in climate model runs. The article shows that when you pick the model runs where by chance the emergent Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation timing matched the real world that the model matched real world temperatures much better. That is solid evidence that the models do a good job of modeling the real world.