The Myth of 'Climate Experts' & Why Tim Flannery is "an Idiot"
Friday, June 29, 2007 at 09:39AM After weather 'experts' got yet another warning of an approaching 'perfect storm' wrong (this time in Sydney, Australia) the Sydney Morning Herald carried an excellent Opinion piece from which this excerpt is taken:
More than 100 studies have found that (climate) experts are often poor forecasters. In one survey Professor Philip Tetlock, of the University of California at Berkeley, obtained 82,361 forecasts from 284 academics, other commentators and professional advisers in the areas of politics and economics. The experts had to select one of three answers (that a situation would not change or would get better or get worse).
The experts performed more poorly than they would have done had they allocated forecasts at random. As an article on Tetlock by Louis Menand in The New Yorker put it: "Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices." Tetlock found that the more famous the commentators or forecasters, the more unreliable their forecasts.
Source: 'A bad explanation is better than none at all', Sydney Morning Herald
And in the same newspaper one politician has had strong words for Oz climate 'expert' Tim Flannery...
The NSW Treasurer, Michael Costa, has called Tim Flannery an "idiot" - just four months after Mr Flannery, the Australian of the Year, launched a climate change forum set up by the Premier.
Mr Costa, a renowned climate change sceptic, made his comments in question time in the Legislative Council, saying the environmental campaigner Mr Flannery was wrong to say that dams were going to dry up because of climate change.
Mr Costa referred to "idiots like Tim Flannery saying it'll never rain" as he launched into a tirade against the theory of greenhouse gases.
He said Mr Flannery and others continually came up with "ridiculous propositions" and told Coalition MPs he would not have appointed Mr Flannery Australian of the Year.
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
NB. Readers of this site should know that the editor of this site does not necessarily agree with views express here. Take Tim Flannery for instance - a better and fairer observation would have been that he is a 'perfect idiot'.
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Reader Comments (3)
The author of the article is an idiot for suggesting that climate is the same as weather.
Wadard,
I'm familiar with the warmists' distinction between climate and weather:
When it's hot it's climate change
When it's cold/wet/anything else it's weather.
Will
Well another cold wet day in brisbane. If you believe global warming alarmists we would all be dying of thirst and heat exhaustion by now. And if you think i'm exaggerating check out 'scorched' screening on prime time channel 9 soon. Even the makers of this crap admit they are blurring the line between fact and fiction. Something Tim Flannery and Al Gore know a lot about. This is otherwise known as lying to sell books and movies. This stops being harmless when it becomes political indoctrination of kids at school and it costs the rest of us our jobs. Let's not forget Hitler was a left wing vegitarian.