Camille Paglia on "fancy-pants, speculative, climate models"

Camille Paglia is listed as one of the top 100 intellectuals in the world today, in fact she’s at number 20.  So, it is with some surprise that I read her response to a question on climate change in a column on Salon.com. See page two on this link.

The computer models make predictions based on a mathematical estimate of how our planet works. All well and good. But as a TV and Radio Meteorologist who’s job its been for 25 years now to delivery timely forecasts to the public, I’d point out that my work relies on computer models every day used to forecast weather days ahead. How often are they right? Well how often is it that I nail a forecast perfectly one week in advance?

How often do you hear me telling you what the weather will be two weeks from now, or a month from now? I don’t do those things. Yet surprisingly, computer weather forecast models exist for those time periods, but they aren’t often correct. Chaos theory doesn’t lend itself well to computer modeling of weather forecasting, and it isn’t taken into account in climate modeling, which tends towards more linear processes. One of the biggest criticisms of climate models, such as NASA/James Hansens Model E, is that it doesn’t handle clouds at all well in it’s calculations.

Here’s what Camille says about climate modeling: (H/T Lon Glazner)

Commenter: I too grew up in upstate New York. I am an environmental groundwater geologist (who almost majored in fine arts). Your take on the Al Gore/global warming pseudo-catastrophe was right on target. Anyone can read up on Holocene geology and see that climate changes are caused by polar wandering and magnetic reversals. It is entertaining, yet sad to read bloviage from Leonardo DiCaprio, who is so self-centered that he thinks the earth’s history and climate is a function of his short personal stay on this planet. Still he, Al Gore, Prince Charles and so on, ad nauseam, continue with their jet-set lifestyles. What hypocrisy!

Hanson

Camille Paglia: Thank you for your input on the mass hysteria over global warming. The simplest facts about geology seem to be missing from the mental equipment of many highly educated people these days. There is far too much credulity placed in fancy-pants, speculative computer modeling about future climate change. Furthermore, hand-wringing media reports about hotter temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are rarely balanced by acknowledgment of the recent cold waves in South Africa and Australia, the most severe in 30 years.

Where are the intellectuals in this massive attack of groupthink? Inert, passive and cowardly, the lot of them. True intellectuals would be alarmed and repelled by the heavy fog of dogma that now hangs over the debate about climate change. More skeptical voices need to be heard. Why are liberals abandoning this issue to the right wing, which is successfully using it to contrast conservative rationality with liberal emotionalism? The environmental movement, whose roots are in nature-worshipping Romanticism, is vitally important to humanity, but it can only be undermined by rampant propaganda and half-truths.