Skip to main content

The Earth has become poorer and colder

The economic modellers and the climate modellers were wrong.

We were told by Glenn Stevens, the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), in August 2007 (during a Federal election campaign):

"...developments to date do not appear to have changed significantly the broader global outlook. Even with the US slowing down, forecasts of global growth have recently been revised upward. "

We were told by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Summary for Policy Makers in 2007 that:

"[Most] of the observed increase in global temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likley due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concertrations."

So how have these statements of such august and responsible public institutions in economics and climate respectively, stood up in the light of the implacable gaze of history?

The RBA's Glenn Stevens told us yesterday that:

"The recent deterioration in prospects for global growth, together with much more difficult market conditions even for creditworthy borrowers, now present the risk that demand and output could be significantly weaker than earlier expected."

And, according to UBS, the US is currently in the middle of two quarters of negative growth. The just completed September quarter has seen a contraction in US GDP of 1% and the current December quarter is expected to contract by 1.5%. Two quarters of negative growth is the text book definition of a recession. The US is in the middle of a recession right now.

The IPCC's assertive certainty about the contribution of GHGs to global temperature increases are also now looking pretty silly. We have been told often enough by a strident media that there has been a massive acceleration in atmospheric CO2 concerntrations in the last decade, and yet, over the same period, global temperatures have fallen. David H.Douglas of the Department of Physics at the University of Richester and John R. Christy of the Department of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama, published a paper in Energy and Environment in August 2008 showing that the contribution of greenhouse gasses to temperature increases in the second half of the 20 century have been at best marginal. Will we get an apology or a retraction from the IPCC?
So we shouldn't trust anyone, no matter who they are, who predicts for us tomorrow's weather or next year's climate or tomorrow's stockmarket or the next quarter's economic outlook.

But where does that leave people who pontificate about the future using economic models of climate models? (or is that climate models of economic models?) Belief in such predictions would surely require a leap of faith of religious dimensions. But these are scientific processes, so they must be right. Right? There's no religion to be seen here. Move along.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Jackson, martyr ?

. Someone has to die for their beliefs to be a martyr . Drudge pointed to headlines last Friday saying that Jackson's was a " Death by Showbusines s". So in the sense that Jackson seems to have died for his belief in celebrity, yes, he might be called a martyr. I never got Michael Jackson. Thriller didn't thrill me at all ( Now Noel Coward, that's another story ). But I did get a bit of a kick from seeing others get him. He was boppy and catchy and slick, as well as monumentally fluffy and hugely impaired. What I struggle with is the apparently massive consequentiality of fluffiness and impairment like Jackson's. What is the fuss about the passing of a semi-talented song and dance weirdo from decades past? Boris Johnson, the London Mayor, has had a stab at explaining it to we mystified souls who struggle to get with the programme. He reckons it's just like Princess Di. And I agree, to the extent that I was almost as unprepared for and dumbfounded by th

Today's Woke guide to Gender, Race and Climate

Gender, Race and Climate. These are the big ideas that matter in the 21st century. So get with the Zeitgeist folks.  You gotta go woke. As I understand the current, constantly changing, received progressive position on these big 3 topics, here's what we're supposed to think and believe: Gender : A person can be whatever gender they want to be. Anyone who thinks or says otherwise commits a crime against humanity. Race : Only blacks, the indigenous and people of colour can have and express legitimate views on blacks, people of colour and indigenous issues. Any white person doing so is a racist, wrongly appropriating the exclusive privilege of disadvantaged victims. Accordingly it is wrong for a non-BIPOC person to believe or, worse, say that all races are equal and that we should never discriminate against any person on the basis of race. This is because a non-BIPOC person cannot understand racial prejudice because they have not experienced negative racial discrimination and beca

Perpetual pretenders proclaiming possession of Truth ... (fact check the fat cheque)

Samizdata.net  have pointed me to an article in Public entitled " Nacissism of the Fact Checkers ". It's a sobering though disturbingly unsurprising read.  It adds to the litany of distressingly wrong facts that have been endorsed and perpetuated by the "official narrative" and with the reciprocal suppression or censorship of correct "falsehoods".  Here's a list of such behaviours by fact checkers from the article: - calling out a self avowed parody site for misinformation on the Paris riots for posting a typically over the top clip from the action movie "Fast & Furious"; -  that claim by the New York Times, AP and the BBC that fake news travels 6 times faster than the factual news, turns out to be fake news itself. The claim is based on a single MIT study on small number of tweets , not news. - Facebook removing 20 million posts, and labeling 190 million posts about Covid-19 as "content moderation" because those posts did