Essay by Eric Worrall
Professor Andy Pitman wants central banks to hire climate scientists to help them build high resolution risk models, to properly evaluate regional climate risk. But the Aussie RBA disagrees their role is to evaluate climate risk.
Trillions of dollars at risk because central banks’ climate models not up to scratch
Climate research finds modelling used cannot predict localised extreme weather, leading to poor estimations of risk
Peter Hannam
Wed 10 Aug 2022 03.30 AEST…
Prof Andy Pitman, director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, said regulators are relying on models that are good at forecasting how average climates will change as the planet warms, but are less likely to be of use for predicting how extreme weather will imperil individual localities such as cities, however.
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“Without a shadow of a doubt, we’re overestimating the cost of climate change in some areas and grossly underestimating it in others,” Pitman said. “We need to take this issue seriously – not just access information flying around and think we can package it to do proper economic assessments.”
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Pitman’s paper, and a separate one he co-authored for Nature Climate Change in 2021, examined the models being used by groups such as the Network for Greening the Financial System. The NGFS advises about 100 central banks and other regulators globally, including Australia’s Reserve Bank and Apra.
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Without their own climate scientists, the RBA and Apra rely on scenarios generated by NGFS to understand how a heating planet will influence economic and financial stability.
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The RBA referred queries to Apra, where a spokesperson said: “Apra’s focus is not on specifying individual climate risks for different regulated entities but rather on ensuring that entities are making lending, investing and underwriting decisions based on a full understanding of the relevant risks, including climate risks.”
“We do not evaluate risks on behalf of the entities that we regulate,” the spokesperson said.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/10/trillions-of-dollars-at-risk-because-central-banks-climate-models-not-up-to-scratch
Professor Andy Pitman’s study is available here.
Of course, to meaningfully model regional climate change, national reserve banks and central banks would need climate models which deliver useful results.
Professor Andy Pitman himself let the cat out of the bag in 2019, about climate model utility, when he revealed climate scientists can’t even tell us whether global warming will increase or decrease rainfall – a pretty important metric for determining climate impacts, especially in a dry country like Australia.
There is also a moral hazard associated with central banks being too prescriptive about risk assessments. If central banks demand regulated entities use specific models, those same central banks will carry moral liability if banks suffer financial losses, because of defects in the central bank risk models.
Betting any imposed model would be defective is a very safe assumption, because all non trivial financial models contain defects and limits.
For example, many financial models in the leadup to the 2007-10 global financial crisis ignored liquidity risk, by assuming that there would always be a buyer for financial instruments. The assumption of infinite market liquidity spectacularly broke down during the 2007-10 subprime crash, when bankers who played it safe, who stuck with the recommendations of their financial models, got stuck with catastrophic loss making subprime mortgage investments they couldn’t offload in time to save their own skins.
One of the great survivors of the GFC, Greg Lippmann of Deutsche Bank, famously made a vast profit during the subprime crash by overruling his computer model recommendations, and betting everything on an imminent total collapse of the market.
What about climate models? I suspect bankers would love to find a way to create better risk models, and would be happy to further integrate climate risk models into their financial risk projections, if such integration yielded value. But are climate risk models ready for incorporation?
Former HSBC responsible banking head Stuart Kirk recently complained he was being pressured to add unrealistic assumptions to climate financial models to make them interesting. “Even with a carbon tax, even with growth, they couldn’t make climate risk move the needle, so they had to get their clever little wonks in the back room to put a gigantic interest rate shock in their models to make headlines”.
Of course some scientists make far more interesting predictions than predictions of mild financial losses, like predictions of imminent catastrophic tipping points or even imminent extinction. But how do you incorporate a wild range of scenarios, from near business as usual to an imminent extinction event, into a financial risk model, and still produce meaningful output? Especially since even climate scientists producing more pedestrian projections sometimes admit their models are running “implausibly hot”?
How do Aussie banks for example model future changes in rainfall into their regional farm mortgage credit score models, when Professor Andy Pitman himself recently admitted that nobody can tell whether global warming will cause continental scale rainfall to increase or decrease?
At least bankers experimenting with market liquidity models have something tangible to work with – they can hindcast their models against high quality historical price and liquidity data, to see if their models generate the right buy / sell signals. But as Anthony Watts has demonstrated, historical global climate data has serious quality issues.
Until climate scientists come up with climate models which produce a narrow range of useful predictions, models which add quantifiable value to risk calculations, they can continue to expect a less than enthusiastic reception outside their immediate fan base, when they try to push bankers to make more use of their product.
I have no problem with Professor Andy Pitman approaching bankers and asking for funding. I was impressed Professor Pitman’s candour, at his admission of model uncertainty in 2019, even if he later appeared to back off and qualify his original statement. I think Professor Pitman would find bankers receptive to the idea of helping to fund the development of better risk models. But it seems a big stretch for Professor Pitman to insist that climate models in their current form are bank risk ready, that models are mature enough for bankers to start hiring climate scientists to help integrate climate models into their risk projections.
This whole “more modelling” argument is akin to the EU claiming, whenever things went wrong, that what was needed was “more Europe” and now the climatariat claiming that the present energy crisis can only be solved by “more renewables”. They really can’t look in the mirror and see that they have been part of the problem, not its solution.
As a side issue, whilst I would hate to presume to correct you Eric, the sub-prime collapse of 15 years ago that lead to the global financial crisis to which you refer, was not initially caused by lack of liquidity – that was a secondary effect, albeit a very important one. The collapse was caused by the financial community’s misplaced religious belief in complex computer models, not least those defining credit risk. The models, a written by some of the finest brains on the planet, failed – disastrously – to predict the correlation between mortgage failures, which were not discrete but followed a domino effect due to human behaviour.
Hmmm, “religious belief in complex computer models”, “written by some of the finest brains on the planet”. Where else have I seen this?
At least they cry when they take and lose your money.
“Without a shadow of a doubt, we’re overestimating the cost of climate change in some areas and grossly underestimating it in others,”
Pitman shoots himself in the foot right here in terms of advising on climate risk! I’m appalled, frankly, at the level of brainpower brought to the table by PhDs in this woefully bankrupted science. Does the Doc know that NASA’s Climate modeler and head of GISS admitted recently that Climate models are running to hot?
Just hire court jesters with wigi boards!
The Reserve Bank of Australia has a recent letter suggesting that they might find it prudent to conduct an exercise of due diligence on the climate science on which they rely. A reply is awaited. Geoff S
Human-caused Climate Change has never been shown to be real so these money handlers need to find some independent verification that Human-caused Climate Change is real before they go giving investment advice about it.
Right now they are “flying in the dark” and are not in a position to give climate change advice.
RBA is bad enough as it is, last thing we need is some klimateklowns there as well
It’s all about jobs for their cronies. When ‘climate studies’ became a popular academic course it was obvious that the universities would quickly reach saturation point for research ‘scientists’ and need to find jobs elsewhere. By insisting that only a climate ‘scientist’ can evaluate these risks correctly they are guaranteeing gainful employment for the surplus. Pretty soon they’ll be insisting that every business, school and government department has one of these muppets installed.
Perfect!
If Mr Pittman thinks these “Climate Scientists” are so important, why didn’t he put his hand in his own pocket and fund them himself, rather than expecting everyone else to pay for his obsessions?
As is well known our own CSIRO has a disclaimer when selling their Expertease,
using their Super computer to supply results to firms
So let the Reserve Bank board ask the “Experts” answer their queries such as rainfall in a hotter planet.
I don’t need a PC for that, try living in the Tropics as I have.
Heat causes evaporation, more heat more evaporation.
Then it all depends which way the air mass moves, plus the need for the moist air to be made to rise & thus cool.
I am sure the experts at the CSIRO can sort out such a simple matter like that.
Michael VK5ELL
Bet you they can’t – they got a degree in ‘climate science’ not an actual, y’know, proper science degree. They only know how to repeat lines and look authorative whilst doing so – it’s far more like a performing arts degree than anything else. Working out how the world actually works must remain with the scientists who did do the more difficult degree – the one Mikey Mann bailed on because ‘the maths was too hard’ – Physics.
” Working out how the world actually works must remain with the scientists who did do the more difficult degree – the one Mikey Mann bailed on because ‘the maths was too hard’ – Physics.”
Unless you add some additional qualifiers to that suggestion, I suggest it’s essentially pointless, at this point ; )
It has long been a thorn in my side when I visit this site that specialties other than “climate science” don’t seem to get much skeptical attention. Just the other day I saw that several physicists of the cosmological sort have basically called the recently much ballyhooed “picture” of a black hole worthless. Turns out the massive dataset used to “produce” the image was so huge, that only a miniscule fraction shows up as that image. Kinda like taking the whole of an image dataset of the Moon and eliminating 99.99… percent of it, to come up with an image of you or I.
It still haunts my mind at times, when I think of the reception of the recent alleged detection of “gravity waves” got here. The process involved in arriving at a way to tell if one wavelet in the “ocean” of minute waves the hypersensitive instrumentation was constantly receiving, was a gravity wiggle from black holes colliding somewhere “out there”, was practically glowing red in my mind when I read of it, and then started flashing red when I read the account of the experience, of the young scientist who was on duty on night, when the “detection” of the special wiggle set off the computer system’s alarm.
He said that at first he thought it was some sort of covert continuation of the “testing” method used to “calibrate” the massive data analysis systems, which had recently been declared successful (and over), because the alarm raising wiggle was so similar to the one that provoked the end of the testing phase.
The testing involved one of three project potentates secretly introducing a “likely” wiggle into the torrent of wiggles the instruments were constantly detecting, and seeing if the (extensive) crew could tell it was a false signal. This was repeated until they couldn’t tell it was a false signal, and the potentates announced the testing/calibrating phase was over.
I was the only one I noticed who commented on the blatantly obvious (to me) potential that the triumphant announcement of success, was actually based on another “likely” wavelet form being injected.
Why, when scores of people’s/colleague’s reputations and future employment is involved, and no one can actually put the results to a test, the skepticism level is not sky high around here, is a mystery to me. I suspect there is such a deep desire to be able to trust Science, that confirmation bias kicks in for many.
Michael V.
Absolutely.
I lived in Singapore for some years, but the heaviest shower [downpour] I ever experienced was off Nigeria. Bonny or Forcados, IIRC.
We were going to a single buoy berth – SBM – and I can remember the rain stinging – through a duffel coat and a boiler suit, as we went forward to tie up.
Berthing deferred – visibility about fifty yards.
Auto
Fifty yards – you could just about see across the ship.
Auto.
“Professor Andy Pitman. Source UNSW”
Who will take a man touting himself as a professor from one of the premier Australian lunatic asylums seriously?
“…to help them build high resolution risk models”
I doubt any climate scientist could faithfully represent anything with their modelling – even using lego, plasticene or play doh.
Why don’t they build a high resolution climate model?
I use a singular, “model”, instead of their “models”. Many models means that there is something wrong with each one.
When I first started looking into CO2-based CAGW, the blog I was following and where I was doing a lot of catching up on the subject was Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog. (He was still taking and responding to comments then! That’s a while back, eh?)
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Two points he made that tipped me over into sceptical inquiry on the topic were:
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1) There were no accurate regional models, so he had little confidence in global models.
2) Land use changes were far better at explaining local and regional changes in climate than changes in atmospheric CO2.
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After a while, I found WUWT, and the focus here at the time was on the surface stations, and other topics, but mostly the temperature record. In the article above, Eric mentions that modelers are trying to hindcast altered or bad temperature records, a prime topic of study here
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Hooked on WUWT, over the years I have been entertained by many articles that feature “yet another thing” that isn’t in the models. Those missing ‘things’ have been discovered by both sceptics and climate scientists alike. Many of the finds were incorporated in the next round of climate models so that “now the climate models are complete… really… we mean it this time.” But we still see articles here from time to time of “yet another thing” that isn’t in the models.
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So, I’d advise the bankers, and my advice is worth exactly what they paid for it, to skip climate models until regional models can prove their worth and then use them. In the meantime, maybe they should consult with those who are focused on how land use changes affect local and regional climates to see how risks have changed.
My 2¢
“Those missing ‘things’”
Over the years they are adding up.
Donald Rumsfeld was quite right, there are things we don’t know that we don’t know.
You can’t admit to that obvious fact in settled science. That would be… heresy.
Most climate realist authors and many of their readers miss the obvious truth about climate models, by thinking like scientists and engineers — like normal people. They do not think like leftist politicians and the scientists they hire to scare people.
This will be so obvious after you read my simple comment that you may be surprised. Don’t feel bad that you did not think like a leftist in the past. To think like that, you take a conservative mind, delete reason and accountability, then fall down and hit your head on the sidewalk. While still dizzy, you may understand how a leftist thinks!
The truth is that accurate predictions are not a goal of the climate computer games. Their goal is to scare people.
They are programmed for predictions that are paid for by governments to scare people. Leftists know that most scared people will demand that their government “do something” about the coming (imaginary) climate crisis they believe in. Leftist politicians live to hear the demand to “do something”. That demand justifies more government power, more government spending, more government mandates and more government subsidies to favored industries. In simple English, MORE GOVERNMENT control over the private sector and less personal freedom — the dream of every leftist.
The COMING CLIMATE CRISIS DOES NOT HAVE TO BE REAL to scare people — it just has to be believed by most people, and it is.
There has been over 40 years to refine climate model predictions, yet they are still not close to being accurate, on average, and they never will be, except by chance.
So far it seems CMIP6 models are predicting even faster global warming than CMIP5 models, on average, which significantly over predicted the rate of global warming in the past.
The government bureaucrat “scientists” do not care that past predictions were not accurate. They are not punished or criticized by the lamestream media. In fact, I suspect they would get fired if they predicted a rate of warming that extrapolated the mild harmless actual warming in the 1940 to 2022 period.
Finally, there is one climate model that least over predicts global warming — the Russian INM model. Does that model get 99% of the attention? No, it gets no attention at all. Because accuracy does not matter.
If weather forecasters had 12 weather forecasting models, and one of them made better forecasts than the 11 others, would they ignore the most accurate model? Of course not. Because their weather predictions will be “found out” to be true, or false, in a few days. No waiting for many decades to find out if the predictions were right, or wrong, as with climate computer game predictions.
If you still believe climate models are intended for accurate predictions, please reply and state why. I have found no evidence that model owners care about accuracy, have had accuracy in the past, or get punished for inaccuracy. The Russian INM model owners might care, or they just had a lucky guess.
Is it because Pravda publishes what the government says should be published, unlike our situation, where the media dictates to governments what they must react to?
re: 1) There were no accurate regional models, so he had little confidence in global models.
It’s a bit worse than that. The climate models are not global, they are micro-local. They aggregate the local predictions, which are all so ridiculously inaccurate that they might as well be random numbers, into regional predictions which are of course no better, and they then aggregate the regional predictions into totally useless global averages.
Actually, random numbers would probably do a bit better. At least they wouldn’t run too hot.
Thanks, Mike.
That was way back when and I was early in learning what the issues were (I wasn’t aware of the surface station issues ’til later).
I just smelled a rat because the solution was going to be a carbon credit exchange scheme and carbon taxes, and just from 4th or 5th grade science I knew how important CO2 is to life on Earth, that it was much higher in the past, and the Earth never experienced runaway global warming from CO2.
I also was very aware of how changes in land use affected local and regional climate. I was in an area that was undergoing a lot of changes from farms to forest or urban and suburban development.
And Al Gore was involved. Yes, I smelled a rat.
I didn’t know “how the (regional models) sausage was being made” until you pointed it out just now, so thanks again.
If I get a chance, I may take a look at regional models. You’ve piqued my interest. I’d think you’d have to at least get a half dozen regions right before you even think of tackling the whole Earth.
The real aim of course is to put climate activists in every major institution so that people-killing policies can be instituted de facto.
Most UK institutions – crucially the Civil service – have been captured already.
Just a other effort to codify armist nonsense into “investment” decision making. No thanks!
Maybe “climate scientists” should develop climate models that accurately replicate the actual recent past (since 1900) before arrogantly suggesting that banks need their guidance for the future (to 10ths of a degree for a century from now).
And stop making changes to the temperature records.
I see from the latest adjusted Dow Jones data, that the latest fall in the stockmarket is the largest on record.
Reserve Banks Should Hire Clairvoyants
Wednesday 10th August 2022
Aries
As the moon and disrupter planet Pluto join forces, you may be surprised by the awful feeling of hopelessness and climate grief that come to mind when you look out and see the Sun shining.
Perhaps because they link to a celebrity lifestyle, maybe even a partner.
But this is a signal of the next direction you should try to take.
Luck links to a woman who loves cats, and has at least four.
Capricorn
Maybe you’re not that comfortable talking about climate anxiety feelings, but writing them down can help you express them, and understand them too.
So obstacles to making one major change to reduce your Carbon footprint seem to fade away.
Your personal moon is on point, and in an interview setting you don’t put a foot wrong.
Luck listens to the climate soothing music of Whale song.”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/horoscopes/19456593/horoscope-today-august-10-2022-star-sign-mystic-meg/
Cheaper than a supercomputer.
😂😂😂
And more accurate when it comes to climate predictions
“Cheaper than a supercomputer.”
Scrap the supercomputers
Bring in the super models, to model skimpier clothing for a warmer world.
Yet another advantage of global warming, in addition to warmer
winter nights in Siberia and greening of our planet.
The majority of religions make predictions or prophesies about coming events. Surely the best bet would be to hire several practitioners of each and every religion and then average their visions to produce an ensemble of coming events.
Andy that’s what they do with the climate models, so why not?
that’s probably what you were getting at…
Trillions of dollars at risk because
central banks’climate models not up to scratchSo called “climate scientists” (mostly modelers) are determined to cement job security in place.
What to clean the toilet?
I can’t think of any other use for a climate scientist.
Some of them can be quite caustic.
The argument that no-one disagrees with the climate modelers is easily refuted by pointing at economic modelers.
If the world is to collapse in 10 years time it should show up in the 10 year bond market. But it doesn’t.
The best paid experts in modelling do not agree with the climate fraternity. This is very embarrassing for the climateers. Expect attacks on mainstream modelers to increase.
My guess is that he is anticipating that a lot of “climate scientists” are going to be looking for work soon.
I looked at the PDF. It it’s based on IPCC RCP8.5 models. 24 pages.
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Acute climate risks in the financial system: examining the utility of climate model projections
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2752-5295/ac856f/pdf
How aout hiring people who realize that expansion of central bank credit is monetary inflation, which causes price inflation, and who also can chew gum and tie their shoes at the same time?
He’s just trying to create work for his comrades in arms, more jobs for Scientology, more money.
Think of the poor Scientologists unable to eat
Sounds like a business killer. Perhaps they should put into their models risk of overthinking of things they don’t know.
This is nonsense. Next, since we cannot possibly develop such models, we will be asked to conduct war games, in which we are required to place ourselves in massive oven rooms to determine the possible damages from excessive heat.
Warren Buffett invests in insurance companies because he believes that there is no climate emergency. He made a lot of money in his lifetime by being a shrewd investor.
It’s enough these days to just be a realist about the impossibility of discarding fossil fuels and oil-based plastics and other materials.
Skep, I question his long term investment in insurance companies with the death rate and payout increasing in death cover, you know, from that pesky Fauci funded bug. /s
As of March 2022, Buffett had 147 billion invested in the insurance industry. He calls it his most important investment. He is not an idiot and has done his homework on the risk assessment of owning insurance stock. When the climate fraudsters screamed about climate emergency he upped his stake in the industry, discounting their alarmist cries. The planet is not burning up, SLR is very manageable and natural disasters are not spiraling out of control. Just look at the named storms in the Alantic basin this year this far. 3 names storms, all tropical storms, lasting a total of 3 days. When NOAA screams about alarming increases in hurricane catastrophies due to climate change, Buffett keeps raking it in.
As an active meteorologist forecasting global weather for over 40 years, my performance score is not far from 100% perfection.
that is the analysis of the models is almost flawless!!!
however, I’ve busted thousands of real old forecasts……because the models were wrong and I believed them.
after several years of this, I spent just as much time looking for why the models might be wrong and busted real world forecasts.
the best weather and climate scientists are ALL BETTER to MUCH better than the models.
with climate, ITW like taking candy from a baby to obliterate model forecasts in some realms.
in others,appreciating the reality based uncertainty keeps you from assigning much more certainty than what actually exists.
its just human nature and irrational motions that cause us to WANT to believe things that confirm what we think that we know, instead of using the scientific method and questioning what e think that we know rigorously.
models are programmed with good math…..but flawed math. They start it’s good observations and assumptions that are also flawed.
it’s much more fun looking at models and pretending they don’t have these built in flaws.
Tha should be busted thousands of real WORLD forecasts
The Central Banks and Supervisors Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) is a group of Central Banks and Supervisors willing, on a voluntary basis, to exchange experiences, share best practices, contribute to the development of environment and climate risk management in the financial sector, and to mobilize mainstream finance to support the transition toward a sustainable economy. Its purpose is to define and promote best practices to be implemented within and outside of the Membership of the NGFS and to conduct or commission analytical work on green finance.
The Network’s purpose is to help strengthening the global response required to meet the goals of the Paris agreement and to enhance the role of the financial system to manage risks and to mobilize capital for green and low-carbon investments in the broader context of environmentally sustainable development. To this end, the Network defines and promotes best practices to be implemented within and outside of the Membership of the NGFS and conducts or commissions analytical work on green finance.
This is from the NGSF website. Sounds like financial conspiracy to me.
Its an example of first deciding on the outcome desired, then ginning up excuses to go for it. Liars playing with your money, not to mention your future wellbeing..
didn’t all the woke investment companies disinvest from oil just before oil stocks started going thru the roof ?
When the war on coal got a bit too intense for comfort, I switched money into coal stocks. Best move I ever made. Well , so far …..
I have a much, much better idea: why not hire a qualified astrologer?
Ed,
Surely an UNqualified Astrologer . . . . .
Auto
These climate scientists are like cancer, building tumors within our institutions.
What an absolute joke. How would a bank go, using climate modellers to guide their business? Well – remember this breathlessly enthusiastic report back in 2016?:
Just imagine, the bank changes the initial conditions in an economic model by just one single dollar, and the model predictions change by many trillions of dollars. That’s like what happened in the NCAR/UCAR tests of the climate models – a change in initial conditions of less than a trillionth of a degree led to regional results varying by 5 degrees and more. The commentators waxed lyrical on how wonderful the models were to be able to predict such wonderful climate variability. Bankers, I suspect, would be less impressed.
Models??
Time to look at reality – There is no global warming.
“when he revealed climate scientists can’t even tell us whether global warming will increase or decrease rainfall”
The NZ govt produced a document that tells us the same thing about expected changes in rainfall in NZ.
It doesn’t stop our politicians and MSM telling us that each and every wet/dry spell is due to climate change though.
https://environment.govt.nz/assets/Publications/Files/Climate-change-projections-2nd-edition-final.pdf
“Until climate scientists come up with climate models which produce a narrow range of useful predictions, models which add quantifiable value to risk calculations, they can continue to expect a less than enthusiastic reception outside their immediate fan base, when they try to push bankers to make more use of their product.”
In my first year, my PhD supervisor made me do some molecular modelling, hopefully as an education rather than a punishment. When he was describing how [useless] protein-structure modelling was I asked him “At what point do such models become useful?”
He laughed and didn’t answer the question.