By Mitzi Perdue
“The internet will have no more economic impact than the fax machine,” said Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. U.S. intelligence insisted the Afghan government would hold for months after the American withdrawal. It fell in eleven days. Military analysts around the world predicted Kyiv would fall within seventy-two hours in February 2022. It never did. The media lined up to predict that “Harry Potter” would flop because kids no longer read. Harry Potter sold half a billion copies.
These were not fringe voices. These were the crowned heads of their domains, credentialed, lauded, confident experts. Their expertise was real, but their predictions were wrong.
Why are experts so often and so publicly wrong?
The Fox and the Hedgehog Problem
The answer comes from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, whose wisdom still matters today: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
• Hedgehogs are deep specialists. They master one domain, seeing the world through a narrow lens. Their training encourages a single track that says double down, go deep, defend your turf.
• Foxes are integrators, generalists who pull ideas from different fields and adapt as reality demands. Foxes do not just tolerate ambiguity; they thrive in it.
Science Measures the Problem with Hedgehogs
Psychologist Philip Tetlock spent twenty years tracking expert predictions about world events. In his two-decade study, Tetlock catalogued more than twenty-eight thousand expert predictions and found that experts were slightly less accurate than a random coin toss.
The questions he posed were simple ones with yes or no answers. For example, would the Soviet Union collapse in five years? Would a major war break out? Again and again, the hedgehogs, the deep experts, failed dramatically. The generalists, however, did substantially better than chance. Their secret was breadth of perspective and adaptability, the classic traits of foxes.
Experts failed because of tunnel vision. Like photographers using a telephoto lens, hedgehogs saw only a narrow slice of reality. Foxes, with a wide-angle view, caught the crucial details on the periphery, the details specialists ignored.
Why This Pattern Persists and Why It Is Dangerous
The deeper someone goes into a field, the more their framework, their one big thing, becomes their only lens. There’s the ever-present danger that new information will be sifted to fit what they already believe. In both science and academia, the native habitat of experts, there is the danger that promotions or tenure or funding will go to the practitioners who agree with an existing consensus.
Some say, only half jokingly, that science advances one funeral at a time. They say this because once someone holds a particular view, that view can become part of their identity, and they will wall off anything that contradicts it. When entire disciplines fall victim to this kind of thinking, you get the worst effects of hedgehog thinking. You get a whole field in which brilliant people are confidently yet spectacularly wrong.
Journalists: Foxes in a Hedgehog World
So where do we find foxes? One place is journalists. The best journalists are forced to be foxes. Every day, they deal with conflicting accounts, unexpected outcomes, and situations where things they were sure of turn out not to be so.
Journalists remind the public, often at great personal risk, that truth is messy and theory must bow to evidence. Their gift is not perfection but rather curiosity, adaptability, and the humility to revise when the facts change. Journalists add the complexity that specialists often remove. In a world flooded with confident error, the fox mind is an antidote.
Experts are often right, but they are also often wrong. We need credentialed authorities because their deep knowledge helps us make sense of complexity. But when it comes to prediction, seek out foxes, that is, the generalists and synthesizers, because their broad perspective and adaptability make them better at spotting large patterns and recognizing new realities. In the end, the wisest guide is not the hedgehog who knows one big thing but the fox who pays attention to everything.
This article was originally published by RealClearScience and made available via RealClearWire.
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“The best journalists are forced to be foxes” the author says, but the rest just echo the received “wisdom”. There are very few “best journalists” covering weather events, so we nearly always get the unscientific alarmist view advertised as solid science. Ditto for Covid. The author is too charitable.
Journalists taught by academic experts, serving an audience that wants not to be informed, but confirmation of their biases, are certainly not foxes. More like trained piranhas.
“So where do we find foxes? One place is journalists.”
Bullshit.
Most journalists follow the predominant ideological narrative. One of the biggest was the Russia-gate scandal that even a casual review of the hoax would have revealed it to be a Democrat Party (led specifically by Hillary Clinton) politically driven narrative. All of the facts were there but were ignored by those with Leftist blinders: The Clinton Campaign paid the lawyers that paid the consulting firm which paid the British spy who fabricated an obviously fake “dossier.” The politicized DOJ, FBI and a gaggle of other three-letter Federal agencies allowed and, at times facilitated the lies.
The list of other obvious ‘journalistic’ malpractice is legion.
Indeed.
I Assuming the authors premise that Journalists are indeed foxes, It’s too bad so many have morphed into lemmings.
A lot of those journalists are paid to morph into lemmings.
Actually it was stated as “the best” journalists.
Unfortunately, those are few and far between.
DF:
The more recent journalistic failing was the coverup of Pres Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.
I just finished the book “Original Sin” on how a small group of White House insiders (and the Biden family) tried to protect & isolate Biden from scrutiny. They were amazingly successful only because the mainstream media (journalists) willingly ignored the obvious, and actively covered for them.
Yet all these failings by journalists, and how the country was grossly misinformed for years was hardly mentioned in the book. Even so, I still suggest people read it.
A bit of a correction.
It is not just the journalists “ignoring “.
Sage Steele had an interview with Biden right after the adjusted election, and already then everything was scripted and she was not allowed by her bosses to deviate from the script to hide Bidens mental state.
This means the bosses of the MSM, those hierarchically above the journalists knew from the get go that Biden was finished and that they had to protect him.
Same with the Epstein case who was already exposed in 2015 by Amy Rohbach,
yet she was instantly shut down by ABC, though there is nothing that can create higher revenues,clicks,viewership than an exclusive story of top politicians having sex parties on a remote billionaires island.
Epsteins action were so well known amongst all CEO’s that they didn’t thought for a second airing it and taking all the money.
It was Chomski who laid out the process is ‘manufacturing consent’. The way the establishment manages to create a narrow band narrative in which they create the illusion of choice and diversity.
We now see this process run broad spectrum on all important political issues: (geo) politics, pandemics, AI (tech), state, ‘climate’.
The main issue is the concentration of power within the media and journalists trained in narrowmindedness. So: are we doing enough in our battle against CO2 emissions? As opposed to ‘should we’. Are ‘we’ sending enough arms to Ukraine? Io: should we. The media then hire the right people to support the narrative creating a loop system.
We are way beyond manufactured consent.
We have a manufactured reality where all relevant western countries face the same debt and invasion crisis at the same time.
A complete perversion of events in Ukraine.
A highly synchronized approach for mandatory military service all over European countries.
“We have a manufactured reality”
Being a YouTube junkie, I’ve noticed that just in the past few years, it now seems that the majority of YouTube channels are totally fake AI- even many if not most of the posted comments.
I am banned from commenting on YouTube, Amazon book reviews, Facebook, and I guess Instagram. On that last one, I bristled at the idea of being banned from a forum I never used, but Meta has a long reach.
Am I rude? No. Do I attack people? No. Do I hold opinions that run contrary to accepted wisdom? Yes. Do I imagine that I am always right? Not hardly. On YouTube I expressed the opinion, well studied, that Paul McCartney is/was a set of identical twins. On Facebook in 2020 I expressed the opinion that there was no virus. I still hold those views. I will not elaborate here. But do I change my mind? More than anyone I know. Me now versus me ten years ago are two different outlooks.
I do not just stumble on these opinions … my office is lined with books, and on my desk right now are ten books that could fly if 3M flags had muscles. I’ll go back through each one and reread the tract that made me flag it to begin with. What was it caught my eye?
Am I special? No. Different? I suppose. I tend to avoid news, and I gag a little each time they introduce an “expert”. Most of them are hedgehogs, if even that. More often it is just a confidence game. Most journalists needed to learn one thing in college, to be smarter than their teachers. That’s so rare. In fact, it will get a person into D-ville.
“that Paul McCartney is/was a set of identical twins”
seems harmless- absurd to have that blocked or deleted then get banned
I can’t judge that as the only stuff I watch there are alternative news channels – and those look very real.
But I do not think that much stuff is AI generated right now.
It still requires tons of electricity to do AI generated stuff of a certain length and quality and electricity ain’t cheap either.
Keep in mind that AI generated voices still suck.
Maybe on a national and corporate level ;but even then the quality ain’t convincing (Ukraine had a crappy AI vid trying to convince people that they still hold pokrovsk )
They don’t hold it but they haven’t fully lost it either. And the Russians are having tremendous casualties.
Almost every community in America once had an independent newspaper or more than one. Much of what they wrote was nonsense but they loved deconstructing politicians and their policies – so it was more in tune with freedom than the current system.
Many of those early American newspapers were also extremely slanderous. George Washington hated them. Some were fronts for Jefferson who didn’t care much for Washington.
That all came to an end with the 1996 Telecommunications Act, that allowed corporations to own all the media outlets in any given market.
All the independents were quickly swallowed up, and the result is the drones of political conformity we have today.
I wonder if the Trump administration is addressing this problem- or if it even sees it as a problem.
“The politicized DOJ, FBI and a gaggle of other three-letter Federal agencies allowed and, at times facilitated the lies.”
This is called “Treason” where I come from.
Treason is very narrowly defined. Certainly, sedition would apply, perhaps espionage.
Well, I think everyone knows what a traitor is, legal definition, or no legal definition.
There were a lot of them in the Obama and Biden administrations. I would love to see some of them go to jail. I think that may be possible because there may still be an ongoing conspiracy to undermine the Republican Party and its leaders by the Democrats.
It’s not nice to try to undermine the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. election process. When you use the power of the federal government to do such things, you are committing illegal acts against all Americans.
Lots of Democrat criminals are in need of punishment. Trump is working on it.
She said, “The best journalists are forced to be foxes.” She didn’t say all. The best is probably just a few %.
And those few get tainted by the rest. Who knows what is factual and what is not.
The only way to have a sense of the truth is to look at as many sources and opinions as possible- but few people do that.
I was with Mitzi for a while, but Journalists are the foxes? I don’t think she’s been paying attention to state of the fourth estate. I’ll bet she’s never heard of Gell-Mann Amnesia. I prefer Richard Feynman’s observation – science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. There may be some honest and competent journalist out there somewhere just like there are places that you can find factual information on the internet (like here most of the time). The problem is finding them among the vast pile of useless crap. Journalist generally have no idea how ignorant experts really are.
Especially expert journalists? I’m with Feynman. It doesn’t mean that all experts are always wrong, but it doesn’t hurt to assume that this is the case.
Rather like the Royal,Society motto “Nullius in Verba”, which could be paraphrased as “Science is belief in the ignorance of experts”, at a stretch.
“Scientists are not honest. And people usually believe that they are. That makes it worse. By honest I don’t mean that you only tell what’s true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind.” — Richard Feynman
Many journalists should be required to wear hats that say “No Diving.”
One common misconception I find all too often is the conflation of “expertise” with “expert opinion”.
Take, for instance, the common rejoinder of alarmists when a skeptic presents a counter opinion about the offerings of their favored “climate science” experts. “Would you go to a plumber to have surgery?” Such a person confuses professional competence with informed speculation, which is what expert opinion actually is.
Any lawyer can tell you that they can find an “expert” to support either side of a given argument.
I’ve always been more inclined to listen to someone who knows a fair amount of many things versus someone who claims to know a lot about a few things.
My definition of an expert is someone who can give a completely convincing explanation of why his prediction was totally wrong.
IMO it is someone who can accurately tell you the outcome of anything in a 1000 super competent peer reviewed pages,
and later on can explain in a single short sentence why he was wrong.
This metaphor suffers from the fact that the original story does not support ths Fox’s position.
In it, the Fox chides the Hedgehog for only having one defense, while he has many tricks that he can employ. Some hounds then arrive: the Hedgehog performs his one defensive trick, which works, while the Fox, unable to make up his mind which of his many strategems to put into action, is torn to pieces….
You speak of the unbiased journalist, but, in climate topics for sure, few have that open-minded perspective. Take Seith Bornstein, for example,
“experts” are idiots who can’t hold down a real job.
Oh, the UN employs flocks of experts.
And Epsteins 2500 squaremeter shag in Manhattan(probably the building with the highest cams per squaremeter ratio on earth) made sure that those experts have the right opinion.
And only the bravest “groomers ” made it to 7th floor of the Pagoda.
“An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.”
― Nicholas Butler
Has a curious journalist ever questioned a climate investigator about how their model really works?
For example, “How, exactly, does your time-step-iterated model deal with the buildup of uncertainty, considering that the climate state computed at each step is the starting point for the next?”
This seems like an obvious question.
Crickets.
How about as simple as “why aren’t there error bars on your graph?”
I got banned from an alarmist site for that question.
David, some of them work on the principle that if you disagree with anything at all, you get banned.
So much for freedom of expression, and the right to be stupid, muddle-headed absolutely wrong, insane or just plain normal. When I’m wrong, I’m wrong, and hopefully someone will be gracious enough to provide appropriate facts.
As J M Keynes supposedly said “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”. My sentiments exactly.
But this can run in different directions. The warmongers constantly push the ‘putin invaded Ukraine’ fact to push for more arms and aggression. They say: the facts have changed but that is propaganda as it is a reaction by a state to their own aggression and then claiming: they started it.
Facts can be manipulated, put in the wrong context etc. It is often narrative based w high confirmation bias and poor ( self) reflection.
Even if there are error bars, can you trust that they’re not just made up?
That’s why they don’t want us to see the data. Per Phil Jones, we might find something wrong with it.
They should publish a measurement uncertainty budget with every climate paper so everyone can see EXACTLY what they considered and its magnitude. I have yet to see a climate paper do this. All they ever do is trumpet how precisely they have located the average value but NEVER do they do such an easy thing as giving the variances or standard deviations of the data.
Hi, Tim. Me again. Since the comments on the previous thread are closed now, I’ll reply to your questions here, because they’re important, and you’ve spouted a lot of insults, which I would like to defend myself against. If you’d prefer to take the discussion somewhere else (an open thread?) to avoid derailing this one, we can do that too.
You wrote:
“Radiation is *NOT* radiant flux.”
Then you wrote:
“Radiation is an ENERGY FLOW, it is a FLUX.”
Someone is very confused here, and it isn’t me. Can you make up your mind, please?
“No, they do *NOT* describe radiation by joules.”
Yes they do. Here is an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiant_energy
Look for the table on SI Radiometry Units, and find the topmost entry on “radiant energy”, and carefully note the units. Report back here with your findings, please.
Now that we’ve sorted that out, can you explain to us very explicitly the difference between “radiant energy” in Joules, and “radiant power” (or “flux”) in Watts? In particular, under what circumstances would you expect radiant energy (the “capacity to do work”) to perform actual measurable work, at some particular rate, and therefore develop power? If you’ve read that entire textbook you quoted from, you will be able to answer this question very easily, like any other physicist.
Your problem is that you simply cannot read. That seems to be a prerequisite for those supporting climate science.
From your link:
You simply can’t seem to get it into your head that what is important is the POWER – reached by integrating Power (joules/sec) with respect to time!
Did you bother to read this for MEANING? “In modern applications involving transmission of power from one location to another, “radiant energy” is sometimes used to refer to the electromagnetic waves themselves, rather than their energy”
In order to calculate HOW MUCH energy is converted to heat you need to know the POWER being sent. Remember? The integration of POWER with respect to time!
Did you look at the definition of radiant flux?
“In particular, under what circumstances would you expect radiant energy (the “capacity to do work”) to perform actual measurable work, at some particular rate, and therefore develop power?”
In order to know how much energy is involved you HAVE TO KNOW THE POWER IN THE SIGNAL! If you know the POWER you can calculate the energy involved! E.g. a microwave parabolic antenna focusing an EM wave to be sent to a receiver. THE STRENGTH OF THAT SIGNAL IS IS DEPENDENT ON THE POWER OF THE SIGNAL! How many joules are in that signal? Can you tell us?
That is MEASURABLE WORK.
YOU DIDN’T ANSWER MY QUESTIONS! i DIDN’T FIGURE YOU WOULD!
Again:
If you can’t answer it’ll be proof you have no idea of what you are talking about! If you can’t answer then be an adult and just admit it.
Radiant flux can be measured and used to determine the total energy over time. How do you measure joules and use it to determine the amount of energy involved in heating the surface of an object? Can *YOU* tell us how to measure the joules in a signal?
“Your problem is that you simply cannot read”
I’m not the one who contradicted myself, am I? No, I have not misread anything.
“You simply can’t seem to get it into your head that what is important is the POWER – reached by integrating Power (joules/sec) with respect to time!”
What? No, “power” is not reached by integrating “power” with respect to “time”. Are you having some writing difficulties, in addition to your comprehension problems? And “important” to whom, exactly?
No, what is “important” is to understand what any of these concepts mean. Let’s try to sort that out, shall we?
“In order to know how much energy is involved you HAVE TO KNOW THE POWER IN THE SIGNAL!”
No, that is not an answer to my question. And it betrays a colossal ignorance of the fundamental principles and concepts involved. This tells me that you either haven’t read any of the rest of that physics textbook, or you misunderstood the entire thing. Please answer the question as specified. I’ll repeat it here:
“under what circumstances would you expect radiant energy to perform work, at some particular rate, and therefore develop power”?
If it’s easier, try to answer the question without the word “radiant” in it.
If you are still stuck, remember Willis’s definitions (not mine, so you can’t accuse me of making them up just to “troll” you):
1) Energy is the capacity to do work
2) Work is what happens when a [net] force is applied to an object
3) Power is work per unit time (or, the rate of doing work)
As another clue, how do you propose to develop “power” (rate of doing work) without starting with some “energy” (capacity to do work)? Can you show us, please? I will need real-world examples, because I have never seen such a thing.
“YOU DIDN’T ANSWER MY QUESTIONS!”
But your questions are nonsense. And you know that. Are you a troll?
If you ask me an intelligent question, I will of course answer it to the best of my ability.
What’s the matter, Tim? Ran out of indefensible nonsense?
Let’s leave aside the fundamental physics concepts for now, which are obviously far above your intellectual pay grade, and see if you can just tell us why you said these two contradictory things:
“Radiation is *NOT* radiant flux.”
and
“Radiation is an ENERGY FLOW, it is a FLUX.”
And also this extremely odd claim:
“POWER – reached by integrating Power […] with respect to time!”
Thanks!
You answer first! My question was posed to you first.
How many joules in a 100 watt signal?
How many joules in a 1000 watt signal?
No, Tim, you did not pose a question “first”. That is a lie. (And your questions are still nonsense, and you know it, which also makes you a troll. If they weren’t nonsense, then of course I would be happy to answer them.)
Rather, my first question to you in the previous thread, after you claimed that “radiation” was associated with “power”, was this one: “And [radiant] “energy” is not the same as “how quickly energy is transferred”, is it?” You did not answer that question. Instead you tried to weasel out of it by posting two contradictory definitions of “radiation”. Having contradicted yourself, you have given up any pretense of being a rational intelligent human being. And if you aren’t one of those, then what are you, exactly? Besides a liar and a troll?
What I can do for you, though, is point out the flaw in your question. Technically in physics there is no such thing as a “100 watt signal” existing by itself. That phrase is an engineering approximation, or in other words a hallucination.
What you can have, in the specific field of radio engineering that you are most familiar with, is a transmitter energized with a certain number of Joules (in electrical scenarios this corresponds to a quantity of Volts per Coulomb of charge), and a receiver energized with a different number of Joules (fewer than the transmitter), at which point you have an energy gradient combined with a conduit (the universal electromagnetic field interacting with the transmitting and receiving antennae for efficient conduction of EM energy), and then energy will flow (in only one direction!), which means the transmitter is now performing work on the receiver, and thereby developing power towards it.
See? No, of course you don’t. Because that’s physics and you’re very obviously not a physicist (being, instead, as I pointed out earlier, a self-contradictory liar and troll). But somehow you think you are one anyway, despite never having read a physics textbook (and that means cover to cover, not just cherry-picking the most sloppily worded short-hand parts of one while contradicting the entirety of the rest – science doesn’t work like that).
Excellent point. When I read an article on “it’s the hottest____ ever!” I note there are no uncertainties given on the temperatures being cited.
Hammer, meet nail squarely. Uncertainty is what engineers are trained in. Things must work within a range of inputs/outputs. They are foxes in a manner of speaking. They must recognize and incorporate a multitude of factors in the designs they make.
Members of the Church of Climate refuse to believe that there a multitude of factors in the climate. Their models fail because they are programmed to react to one thing only – CO2. Uncertainty and errors are the tools of unbelieving critics to denigrate the knowledge of acolytes. When was the last time you saw model projections with a constant CO2 over time? I don’t recall one, but that is really a good indicator of what is the most important factor it has been programmed for.
Instead of actually spending money to do a proper analysis of uncertainty just ignore it. They do so at their peril. People are starting to ask why their electric bills are sky rocketing yet temperatures are not rising. I hear from more and more people asking me about why, if temps are no longer rising exponentially, do we need to do more?
The skeptical, worldly wise and educationally weak journalists of the bygone era were wonderfully foxy. Today’s journalists, particularly those that cover climate, aren’t even hedgehogs, they’re ideologically driven idiots.
Or AI.
Is there a newspaper worth buying anymore?
Nope.
Only if it has a decent comics section and a good crossword puzzle.
Absolutely.
The Onion turned back to print last year.
And its Kissinger interview is still one of the most accurate pieces of predictive journalism one can find.
If the amount of information we have available now is any indication of what AI would produce with accuracy, even with improved precision, one must wonder. This mass has made/allowed/occurred (?) with this overriding specialization which selects against study of adjacent fields which is particularly important for environmental applications. Couple this with other problems such as quantitative evaluations (impact factors, advertising), centralized items including research, diminished time writing and editing, and other factors that discourage sufficient thought, what occurs now may not be so surprising.
However, maybe AI can expose more now so much easier cut and paste which seems incautiously used in a large number of ‘scientific’ papers. Less than good things sometimes produce something of value.
When did you ever see a study reported that used a broad range of disciplines to evaluate the optimum temperature of the globe? The predominant assumption of warmists and CAGW advocates is that any warming is bad and has catastrophic consequences.
When at UCLA years ago the joke was an expert is someone with a box of slides 50 miles from home.
As far as journalists now days they are educated (indoctrinated) at liberal universities (which comprise most universities) and all relate the progressive line about news subjects.
Some of course are conservative and we get different perspectives.
“an expert is someone with a box of slides 50 miles from home.”
Not sure I get the reference. Does it mean they haven’t really seen much?
No it meant anyone giving a presentation who was 50 miles from home or more. It was simply a joke in my field of pathology.
I took it that he meant someone who was about to make a presentation at a meeting somewhere away from home. In the old days we used to carry a box of slides to conferences to make our research presentations.
While I share the view that experts can become narrowly focused and miss the wider view I don’t share the authors view of journalists. Whether we are talking about academics, scientists, or journalists any of them can become focused in on a single point of view. I think journalists are more dangerous because they write things that aren’t stated in let’s say a study but might seem plausible. There may be dozens of academics and scientists that stretch their finds but hundreds of journalists who will do it. And the journals have audiences far, far greater than the experts.
All for ad click revenues.
Journalists saving us from experts is on par with the notion that communism (UBI) will save us from the robots (AI).
# yrs ago, Huff Post reprinted a Krugman article from the NYT where he claimed a $1 trillion platinum coin could circumvent Obama’s problem with the country’s approved debt limit. I commented the coin was essentially “check kiting” which is illegal. Krugman replied it was definitely not. My quick response with the check kiting definition caused ‘crickets’ from Krugman.
Krugman flip flops on USA govt debt depending who is president. The old adage applies:
2+2 = ?
Engineer 4; Statistician ‘in the 3-5 range’, Economist ‘what do want it to be’
Anyway, it appears to this retired CFO, the economist practice has slipped into Climate Science.
– Berényi Péter 2/17/2013 https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/17/global-warming-consensus-looking-more-like-a-myth/#comment-983827
If you ask the most expert specialists in ANY field whether the core assumptions of THEIR OWN field are valid, you will always get the same answer: “yes.”
That answer is correct for some fields, but wrong for others.
For instance, if you ask cold fusion researchers, or practicing homeopaths, or even astrologers whether the core assumptions of their OWN field are valid or hokum, they’ll tell you those assumptions ARE valid—and that is the wrong answer.
The comparison of climatology with homeopathy is particularly apt, because one of the core assumptions of climate science is nearly identical to the “water memory” on which homeopathic medicine is based: the claim that CO2 has just as much warming effect after it is removed from the air as it had when it was emitted. The IPCC calls that “TCRE” (Transient Climate Response to Cumulative Carbon-dioxide Emissions) and “RCB” (Remaining Climate Budget), which are the justification for the “Net Zero” campaign. I call it homeopathic climatology. It’s as nonsensical as homeopathic medicine’s “water memory.”
Of course in the real world the warming effect of CO2 is not proportional to total CO2 emissions, it is proportional to (the logarithm of) the amount of CO2 remaining in the atmosphere—and CO2 doesn’t remain in the atmosphere for very long.
The IPCC wasn’t always so invested in pseudoscience. It is well established that the “adjustment time” (effective atmospheric lifetime) of CO2 added to the atmosphere is only about fifty years, which makes its half-life about ln(2) times that, which is about 35 years. Thirty years ago even the IPCC used to admit that fact:
Mankind is currently adding CO2 to the atmosphere at a rate of about 5.2 ±0.8 ppmv/year (mostly from fossil fuels). Natural “sinks” are currently removing CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate of about 2.7 ppmv per year. So the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is rising at a rate equal to the difference, which is about 2.5 ppmv/year.
The natural sinks are mostly the oceans, the terrestrial biosphere (“greening”), and soil enrichment. The net rate at which they remove CO2 from the air depends mostly on the atmospheric CO2 concentration (Knorr 2009). For every 50 ppmv rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration, the net rate of natural CO2 removals accelerates by about 1 ppmv/year.
The concentration is currently about 130 ppmv above its equilibrium level of about 295 ppmv, so you can predict that net natural removals should be 130/50 = 2.6 ppmv/year, which is close to the observed current removal rate of about 2.7 ppmv/year.
But the IPCC’s TCRE, RCB, Net Zero etc. are based on the assumption that that massive flux does not matter, because the control knob for temperatures is “cumulative emissions.” That’s not the amount of CO2 actually accumulated & remaining in the atmosphere, but rather the mathematical summation of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions to date. I.e. they claim that the mere memory of CO2 long gone from the air has as much warming effect as the CO2 which remains.
The “CO2 Memory” of homeopathic climatology is as nonsensical as the “Water Memory” of homeopathic medicine, but that hasn’t prevented governments and scientific societies around the world from embracing Net Zero. We live in very unscientific times.
Nice one!
Trust is earned and I don’t know these people.
Most of us here thankfully recognize that journalists are not “foxes” in the sense of this article. Maybe more like weasels. Lying weasels, stupid duplicitous weasels is more like it.
No offense meant to weasels by comparing them to journalists, sorry…
The very sad thing is that true “journalists” are an extraordinarily rare commodity in today’s media.
Where is the global recession Krugman predicted in 2016 if Trump became president?
How can anyone trust people like him to be an economic advisor when he gets it so horribly wrong?
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
Mark Twain.
Being a scientist means or should mean entertaining the notion that the experts are wrong. Feynman.
“So where do we find foxes? One place is journalists. … Their gift is not perfection but rather curiosity, adaptability, and the humility to revise when the facts change.”
This essay must be a time-traveler, because it describes a species of journalists that went extinct shortly after 1970.
Hmm – after posting this, I saw that many others already recorded the same reaction. Just wanted to say, but still, I’ll add mine.
Following experts like Krugman is a bad bet. Since winning a Nobel he shifted to being an intellectually dishonest political advocate.