Daniel Davis’ insights about predictions can unlock the climate change debate

By Larry Kummer, from the Fabius Maximus website.

Summary: Here are three powerful insights by Daniel Davies about predictions by experts. He used them to predict the outcome of the Iraq War. This post applies them to the public policy debate about climate change; you can use them to provide insights on other intractable problems.  This is the another in a series about validating the case for public policy action to fight climate change.

Daniel Davies is a London-based analyst and stockbroker; he writes at his blog and the Leftist website Crooked Timber. Here he explains how he was able to accurately predict the disastrous outcome of our invasion of Iraq (different entirely from the theory-based predictions of those using history and 4GW). It is well-worth reading in full. His insights have great power and apply to many business and public policy issues — such as climate change. Excerpt…

… Here’s a few of the ones I learned {at business school} which I considered relevant to judging the advisability of the Second Iraq War.

Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.

I was first made aware of this during an accounting class. …

Fibbers’ forecasts are worthless.

Case after miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. … If you have doubts about the integrity of a forecaster, you can’t use their forecasts at all. Not even as a “starting point”. …

The Vital Importance of Audit.

Emphasised over and over again. Brealey & Myers on Corporate Finance has a section on this, in which they remind callow students that like backing-up one’s computer files, this is a lesson that everyone seems to have to learn the hard way.

Basically, it’s been shown time and again and again; companies which do not audit completed projects in order to see how accurate the original projections were, tend to get exactly the forecasts and projects that they deserve. Companies which have a culture where there are no consequences for making dishonest forecasts, get the projects they deserve. Companies which allocate blank cheques to management teams with a proven record of failure and mendacity, get what they deserve.

There are two distinct insights here. The first concerns our personal reasoning. The second concerns the information processing systems built by organizations. Both are essential flaws in our society that help make modern propaganda so effective.

From Stephen Covey’s “The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything“.

(1)  The importance of credibility

“Yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.”

— Leo Tolstoy, “Three Methods Of Reform” (1900).

Both Left and Right in America have learned that their followers lack skepticism; they’ll happily believe stories so long as they fit their world view — stories that are ideologically pleasing, with proper roles for the good and bad guys. Without skepticism, credibility is too cheaply earned.

Each side clearly sees this behavior in their foes, but not in themselves (i.e., fact-checking has become a partisan game). For example, countless posts at Crooked Timber document the Right’s denial of reality (as have I). Do any document the Left’s similar misrepresentation of climate science Here are some examples of climate activists exaggerating, misrepresenting, or outright denying known climate science.

• A skillfully inaccurate article in The Guardian about climate change refugees.
• A skillfully misleading story about global warming in Alaska that’s set Twitter aflame.
• The North Pole is now a lake! Be very afraid!
• Skillful propaganda in Mother Jones about polar bears.
• Skillfully misleading articles about melting of Yosemite’s biggest glacier.
• Skillful propaganda in The New Yorker about “The Siege of Miami”.
• About “fibbers’ forecasts”: Manufacturing climate nightmares: misusing science to create horrific predictions.

Perhaps the Left’s most outrageous propaganda is their denial of what climate scientists call the “pause” or “hiatus” in the two centuries of global warming (most or all since 1950 caused by us, per the IPCC’s AR5). Scores of papers (see the links and abstracts) mark scientists’ progress through recognition of the phenomenon, analysis of its possible causes, and predictions of when it will end. Leftists work to keep their flock ignorant of this research. For examples see these articles by Joe Romm at ThinkProgress and Phil Plait at Slate..

“… first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:5).

(2)  Warning about systems that lack strong audits

“Trust can trump Uncertainty.”

— Presentation by Leonard A Smith (Prof of Statistics, LSE), 6 February 2014.

The public policy debate about climate change rests almost entirely on the forecast of computer models. Forecasts of models are inherently impossible to prove; even robust testing is difficult. Furthermore the frequent misuse of models gives us reason for skepticism. Such as the bogus credit models that proved collateralized debt obligation securities (packages of mortgages, even subprime ones) were of investment grade, those making the obviously false claim that 30 thousand species go extinct every year, and the misrepresentations of the UN’s probabilistic forecast of 11 billion people by 2100.

Hindcasting is the basis given for trusting the climate models used by the IPCC, the basis given for making public policy decisions having multi-trillion dollar effects on the world economy– perhaps even changing the nature of our economic system (as urged by Pope Francis and Naomi Klein).

Unfortunately the large literature about model validation says that hindcasting is inadequate when using the historical data with which the model was designed (e.g., for parametrization) for validation. Worse, it has failed to convince a majority of Americans despite a 27 year-long-campaign (since James Hansen’s Senate testimony), with climate change consistently ranking near or at the bottom of the public’s major policy concerns (e.g., Gallup). Rightly so, since neither the models nor their predictions have been audited by outside experts (i.e., an unaffiliated team of experts in climate, physics, software, etc).

For more about the challenge of validating climate models…

• About models, increasingly often the lens through which we see the world.
• Will a return of rising temperatures validate the IPCC’s climate models?
• We must rely on forecasts by computer models. Are they reliable?
• A frontier of climate science: the model-temperature divergence.
• Do models accurately predict climate change?

Where do we go from here?

How unprepared are we? “We don’t even plan for the past.”

— Steven Mosher (member of Berkeley Earth; bio here), a comment posted at Climate Etc.

The public policy debate has become gridlocked, giving us some choices. We can listen to the two sides bicker for another 27 years (by which time the weather will have given the answer), or we can seek ways to restart the policy debate.

Karl Popper believed that predictions were the gold standard for testing scientific theories. The public also believes this. Countless films and TV shows focus on the triumphal moment when a test proves a scientists’ prediction . Climate scientists can run such tests today for global surface temperatures. This would provide the equivalent of an audit and produce evidence about models predictive power superior than anything shown so far.

Any new approach probably will be denounced by Left or Right — or both. Let’s try new approaches, even if we have to “color outside the lines”.