COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
For decades, climate change researchers and activists have used dramatic forecasts to attempt to influence public perception of the problem and as a call to action on climate change. These forecasts have frequently been for events that might be called “apocalyptic,” because they predict cataclysmic events resulting from climate change.
In a new paper published in the International Journal of Global Warming, Carnegie Mellon University’s David Rode and Paul Fischbeck argue that making such forecasts can be counterproductive. “Truly apocalyptic forecasts can only ever be observed in their failure–that is the world did not end as predicted,” says Rode, adjunct research faculty with the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, “and observing a string of repeated apocalyptic forecast failures can undermine the public’s trust in the underlying science.”
Rode and Fischbeck, professor of Social & Decision Sciences and Engineering & Public Policy, collected 79 predictions of climate-caused apocalypse going back to the first Earth Day in 1970. With the passage of time, many of these forecasts have since expired; the dates have come and gone uneventfully. In fact, 48 (61%) of the predictions have already expired as of the end of 2020.
Fischbeck noted, “from a forecasting perspective, the ‘problem’ is not only that all of the expired forecasts were wrong, but also that so many of them never admitted to any uncertainty about the date. About 43% of the forecasts in our dataset made no mention of uncertainty.”
In some cases, the forecasters were both explicit and certain. For example, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich and British environmental activist Prince Charles are serial failed forecasters, repeatedly expressing high degrees of certainty about apocalyptic climate events.
Rode commented “Ehrlich has made predictions of environmental collapse going back to 1970 that he has described as having ‘near certainty’. Prince Charles has similarly warned repeatedly of ‘irretrievable ecosystem collapse’ if actions were not taken, and when expired, repeated the prediction with a new definitive end date. Their predictions have repeatedly been apocalyptic and highly certain…and so far, they’ve also been wrong.”
The researchers noted that the average time horizon before a climate apocalypse for the 11 predictions made prior to 2000 was 22 years, while for the 68 predictions made after 2000, the average time horizon was 21 years. Despite the passage of time, little has changed–across a half a century of forecasts; the apocalypse is always about 20 years out.
Fischbeck continued, “It’s like the boy who repeatedly cried wolf. If I observe many successive forecast failures, I may be unwilling to take future forecasts seriously.
That’s a problem for climate science, say Rode and Fischbeck.
“The underlying science of climate change has many solid results,” says Fischbeck, “the problem is often the leap in connecting the prediction of climate events to the prediction of the consequences of those events.” Human efforts at adaptation and mitigation, together with the complexity of socio-physical systems, means that the prediction of sea level rise, for example, may not necessarily lead to apocalyptic flooding.
“By linking the climate event and the potential consequence for dramatic effect,” noted Rode, “a failure to observe the consequence may unfairly call into question the legitimacy of the science behind the climate event.”
With the new Biden administration making climate change policy a top priority, trust in scientific predictions about climate change is more crucial than ever, however scientists will have to be wary in qualifying their predictions. In measuring the proliferation the forecasts through search results, the authors found that forecasts that did not mention uncertainty in their apocalyptic date tended to be more visible (i.e., have more search results available). Making sensational predictions of the doom of humanity, while scientifically dubious, has still proven tempting for those wishing to grab headlines.
The trouble with this is that scientists, due to their training, tend to make more cautious statements and more often include references to uncertainty. Rode and Fischbeck found that while 81% of the forecasts made by scientists referenced uncertainty, less than half of the forecasts made by non-scientists did.
“This is not surprising,” said Rode, “but it is troubling when you consider that forecasts that reference uncertainty are less visible on the web. This results in the most visible voices often being the least qualified.”
Rode and Fischbeck argue that scientists must take extraordinary caution in communicating events of great consequence. When it comes to climate change, the authors advise “thinking small.” That is, focusing on making predictions that are less grandiose and shorter in term. “If you want people to believe big predictions, you first need to convince them that you can make little predictions,” says Rode.
Fischbeck added, “We need forecasts of a greater variety of climate variables, we need them made on a regular basis, and we need expert assessments of their uncertainties so people can better calibrate themselves to the accuracy of the forecaster.”
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“For decades, climate change researchers and activists have used dramatic forecasts to attempt to influence public perception of the problem and as a call to action on climate change. These forecasts have frequently been for events that might be called “apocalyptic,” because they predict cataclysmic events resulting from climate change.”
If there was a real problem then they wouldn’t need to exaggerate, it would be obvious to everybody. But of course what’s really obvious to everybody is there is no climate emergency.
People are fed up with being lied to.
The problem with your “cry wolf” idiom is that in the end the wolf does show up, unlike the climate apocalypse™.
There’s a chapter in the first volume of ‘Climate Change – The Facts’ ( not to hand) which describes the science of forecasting in some detail and how utterly bad is the IPCC.
“International Journal of Global Warming” from the Department of Redundancy Department and just as useful
I should know I am a soothsayer.
Crystal ball screens with addled data sprung,
Patterned web of lies sighs the louder.
Then woven damage of the soothsayer’s tongue,
Raised dismal projected strife the higher.
Subliminal whispered beguiling songs,
Implants distressed visions within a psalm.
Soothsayer voices past of beaten wrongs,
Spread UN’s anointing oils of alarm.
“Distress fortune burns ahead,
With inundated coral island death.
Profligate forebear’s inertial life misled,
More woeful guilt of your child’s suffering breath.”
No! Sustain your ungored heart with truth,
Eye soothsayer’s conjured warmth deceit
Instruct a future promise within the youth,
With straight light of observed event.
Hear not destructive soothsayers’ hymn.
For who on earth can ever know
So ‘Live rational!’ be your maxim.
When Chaos’s airs will forever blow.
The main problem is that the CGM’s predict a rising average global temperature. From this almost *everyone*, scientist and non-scientist, assumes it is maximum temps that are going up and almost all of the catastrophic forecasts are based on this, the earth will turn into a cinder from ever higher temperatures.
The CGM’s don’t predict precipitation, they don’t predict clouds, they don’t predict sea level rise, they don’t predict crop growth, they don’t predict greening/non-greening, they don’t predict anything but some hokey average global temperature that can’t actually be measured anywhere.
This is the most basic lie of the so-called climate scientists – they lie by omission – if they told the public that it was MINIMUM temps going up that is causing the average to go up then no one would worry and the money faucet would be turned off. The people would know that minimum temps going up would lead to fewer deaths by cold, longer growing seasons meaning more food, and less extreme weather due to smaller latitudinal temperature differences. Good things, not bad things.
All correct, thank you Tim G. I recently talked with my friend, top meteorologist Joe D’Aleo and he made the same point – also that many of these rising minimums are caused by the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, as municipalities grow and more and more land area is covered by development.
The observed moderate rise in minimum temperatures is all positive news – the climate doomsters know this, but are deliberately lying to the public – their core competence. They have been lying to us for decades, certainly since ~1982 or even earlier, possibly circa 1970.
The climate doomsters are panicking now, because they know they’ve been riding on a natural solar-driven global warming trend that is now ending, and solar driven global cooling has begun – as we predicted in 2002. Their global warming fraud will soon become obvious to even the most obtuse of humanity, who are unlikely to accept their latest blatant lie – that “warming causes cooling”. LOL!
Their “jig is up” – hence the huge mail-in vote fraud to defeat Trump and elect BIden and his motley crew of Chinese Communist Party puppets – Biden is the Manchurian Candidate.
I fear for America, the dying bastion of liberty in an increasingly compromised, dystopian world.
Reminders of Climate Reality – Cold Kills
Storm of the Century – the Blizzard of 1949
The “Long Winter” of 1880/81
“The underlying science of climate change has many solid results….” Name one that can be proven. Without proof science is theory at best and scaremongering at worse and “climate science” is both.
Science does not provide “proof”. At best it provides an answer to a question. If the answer holds under scrutiny and cannot be falsified, we say it’s true.
Telling the rent-seeking climate dowsers (like Santer, Dessler, Schmidt) and climastrologers (like Mann, Hayhoe) to stop making apocalyptic forecasts is like telling the scorpion not to sting the frog. It is their nature.
Their raison d’être.
Of course, the converse of these “apocalyptic” forecasts are those that are overhedged, like …
More CO2 leads to shortness of breath leads to more resting sitting on cold rocks leads to hemorrhoids
Easy
Climate science has nothing to do with predictions of future climatic disaster. Equating the two is a political exercise only, as no one can tell the future. The main thing to keep in mind is that humans cannot change the weather or the climate politically. If they could, the issue would have been solved hundreds of years ago when we burned witches at the stake for weather cooking.
“..the International Journal of Global Warming…”
WTF ?
You have GOT TO BE KIDDING! Please tell me this is a parody— that such a thing doesn’t really exist.
God help us all.
Next up:
Climate Change is a white supremacist construct
or is White Supremacy a Climate Change construct?
Leftists are already there….
According to a curator at the Smithsonian Museum, evil “Whiteness” includes adherence to such evil concepts as: the Scientific Method, cause and effect, objective reality, empirical evidence, rational thought, etc.
I’m not kidding:
https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1283372233730203651?s=20
NYT columnist suggests avoiding the use of critical thinking: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opinion/fake-news-media-attention.html
“If this is not a claim where I have a depth of understanding, then I want to stop for a second and, before going further, just investigate the source,”
I ask you, has a single prediction of Man-made Catastrophic Climate Change made in the last 30-years actually come true?
No, not one prediction has come true in all this time. That includes the Human-caused Global Cooling scare, too.
This is a published postscript on the entire Obama Administration and its Party holdovers in the Biden Administration. And Penn State is down the road too.
And somewhere out in the Ort Cloud there is a planetoid with your name on it. It doesn’t really matter what the warning time is because the current crop of leaders have a more lucrative crisis gig to keep pushing. They would probably continue that line right up the end because one pays and the other is a cost.
They failed to prove phrenology so they have changed to palmistry.
Charles,
Dr.Myles Allen anticipated this in May 2019 when he mildly rebuked Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion.
See “Why protestors should be wary of ‘12 Years to Climate Breakdown’ rhetoric.”
Published in The Conversation and republished in The Guardian on April 19.
However the train has left the station and it is too late to rein in the hysteria.
Get a co2 worshipper to stop lying? Good luck with that.
There is zero incentive to temper catastrophic predictions. The people making them are never held accountable. Ehrlich has received more than $2.5 mill in various ecological prizes over the last 20 years. Remind me why he would stop making ridiculous predictions.
I found this part hilarious:
Yeah, like the short-term prediction in January that February would be nice and warm in Texas …
The problem is that chaotic systems by their very nature are only marginally predictable, even in the extremely short term. That’s why cyclone predictions a couple days out have a “cone” rather than a single predicted track.
We now have satellites watching the planet 24/7 and supercomputers modeling the weather … and despite that, last month a prediction of 3″ of rain at my house two days before the fact became a scant half-inch when it occurred.
The truly looney-tunes part is that people actually believe that the same computer models that failed so horrible by tens of degrees in Texas and by inches of rain at my house can predict the temperature in the year 2100 to within a couple degrees …
w.
Yeah, but those are Palaeoclimatology related.
Nothing to do with models, petty sure this guy is going on about models.
What is absurd is the concept that you can test a modeled climate change prediction.
What a joke … so … what type of time-machine do you own?
Talk about apocalyptic predictions! The following is Sir James Bevan, chief executive of the UK Environment Agency,( at the annual conference of the Association of British Insurers as reported in The Guardian 24.2.21
“Much higher sea levels will take out most of the world’s cities, displace millions, and make much of the rest of our land surface uninhabitable or unusable.Much more extreme weather will kill more people through drought, flooding, wildfires and heatwaves than most wars have.The net effects will collapse ecosystems. slash crop yields, take out the
infrastructure that our civilisation depends on, and destroy the basis of the modern economy and modern society.”
(The Environment Agency has faced repeated critcism recently for its approach to flood control in several parts of the UK, so it may just be possible that he doesn’t believe what he is saying but is just passing the buck. OR NOT)
If the climate disaster seems to be about 20 years away for most alarmists, and then recently 12 years for AOC and 9 years for John Kerry, it is useful propaganda to incite young people like Greta Thunberg to jump on the bandwagon and scream “We gotta do something NOW!”
Older people, who have memories of what the climate was like 30, 40, or 50 years ago, and notice that not much has changed, tend to be more sanguine and skeptical, reacting, “Yeah, I heard that predicted for some year in the past, and it never happened, why should I believe it now?”
The “gloom and doom” climate “predictors” are similar to some religious cults, who predict some catastrophe a few years in the future, and promise that people who join their cults will be saved. Then, when the catastrophe never arrives, they say that their “prophet” misread the signs, and that it will still happen a few more years in the future. Just keep those tithes and checks coming in! Amen!
People who actually study the weather and climate know that there are many natural forces that affect the climate at any location on Earth, such as the El Nino / La Nina cycles, shifts in ocean currents, the polar vortex, volcanism, and changes in solar radiation, which have much stronger effects than minuscule additional IR radiation absorbed by CO2, whose effect diminishes as the CO2 concentration increases (saturation of IR absorption bands, interference from water vapor).
There are also huge negative feedback loops in the Earth’s environment that tend to damp out short-term swings, such as the huge heat of fusion of ice, and the huge heat capacity of the oceans, that guarantee that changes in sea level will be so slow that it is difficult to measure them accurately, when compared to the twice-daily cycle of the tides with a much higher amplitude.
If the biggest threat from “global warming” is sea-level rise eventually flooding coastal cities, there is still no evidence that the current sea-level rise rate of 2 to 3 mm/year (depending on how it is measured) is accelerating.
So, rather than depriving everyone of needed energy, why not plan on the sea-level rise continuing indefinitely at that rate, or about 8 to 12 inches per century, and take measures to protect the inhabited coasts? Building a sea wall 1 foot high in a century doesn’t seem like an impossible task, and is much cheaper than trying to build enough windmills and solar panels to replace coal and natural gas.
i predict they will continue to make long term erroneous predictions
COVID was released to impose draconian rules onto society “for our own good” – lol
A couple of years back, there was a piece by Judith Curry reprinted here on this general topic, from from a different angle.
Here was a tweet I wrote back then, and a comment I had added here on WUWT discussion of the article:
“There was a piece by Judith Curry today on Watts Up With That, regarding the trauma that these so-called scientists are feeling, because not enough people are paying attention to them when they scream about doomsday.
I said a few words.”
https://twitter.com/NickMcGinley1/status/1148803812595048448?s=20
Climate scientists’ pre-traumatic stress syndrome – Watts Up With That?
I said:
If they think the world is ending in spite of the fact that everything is getting better, it is not “the appearance of bias”.
It is clownish refusal to recognize that one’s fears are all imaginary.
One thing should be obvious to everyone: One side is correct, and the other side is wrong.
So, how to decide, if one has no actual knowledge of the facts, or the skills and ability to delve into those facts for clarity?
Well, one approach that seems logical is to look at which side keeps predicting stuff that does not happen.
Which side has really bad judgement about what effective strategies might be for eliminating CO2 production (conceding for the sake of argumentation that such a need exists)?
Which side alters data instead of modifying their hypothesis?
Which side ignores entire libraries of information about physical geography, and Earth history, and written and photographic historical accounts ,and archeology, and yadda yadda yadda, and instead focuses intently on a notion with mysteriously unobservable consequences?
And which side is part of a political philosophy that wants to fold all the ills of Man into an overarching theme that has for a solution the granting of all powers and all controls to it’s adherents?
One side behaves like con artists, grifters, and flim flam experts.
They refuse to address a very long list of problems with their idea, refuse to debate or even acknowledge a difference of opinion, and go out of their way to disparage and marginalize anyone, even on their own side, who offers any hint of criticism, or even a balanced view.
The insist on a revised version of the scientific method that rejects such standards as the ability to make predictions, and instead inserts such things as a corrupted “peer review” process, taking a vote but only counting “ayes”, and such logically fallacious forms of evidence as relying on the opinions of so-called experts (never mind that these are the experts who have a batting average of very close to .000 re validation of predictions). In other words, they have replaced the actual scientific method with the exact way of deciding what is what, that the scientific method replaced!
At the present time, we have an avalanche of media figures and politicians and activists bombarding the world with incessant and shrill alarmism. At the same time all moderation has left the pronouncements of these individuals and groups: Bad weather is now synonymous with “climate change”, and even one hot day in one isolated location is widely cited as proof positive of an ongoing worldwide crisis, even if no actual harm comes from it. But an extended period of record cold and frost in mid-Summer not even a week later, in the exact same spots, is completely ignored!
It is all hype, all the time, with nary a fact in sight.
And where are people like Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann while all this is going on?
While the inanity and exaggerations reach all time high levels, the tendency for actual scientists to speak up and call it out has gone from hesitant to non-existent.
The people who should be telling everyone that the idea of the world ending in 12 years, has no basis in science or even in rational discourse, are instead deafeningly silent.
Add it all up, and it is more clear than ever: This is not a science, it is a weaponized form of disinformation.
The proponents of it range from people who are surely lying, to those who are spectacularly duped, to those who are profiteers with no care for science or truth.
Scattered throughout are conniving politicians, “If-It-Bleeds-It-Leads” media hacks, gravy train bandwagon-hoppers of various descriptions, and several flavors and stripes of agenda driven ideologues.
Hard to say where the people mentioned as being PTSD-suffering insomniacs figure in to it all. Some are likely miseducated, some not very bright but high in what cognitive scientists call conscientiousness, and some just incredibly neurotic.
All should ask themselves how it can be that, while the present has never been better, their assessment for the immediate future is unprecedented doom?
All of this would be terribly interesting but ultimately unimportant if it was like any other disagreement in science.
Instead, the fact is the stakes in this are very high, as high as they could be, and it has nothing at all to do with science.
This is a con, and what is sought is power and money, the stakes are human lives, at risk is control of our own lives and our very freedoms, and the endgame of the loudest voices is global socialism.