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Wednesday 31 August 2011

Time to move on


Once we reach a certain age, most of us have enough experience of life to want to put it into some kind of order. We need to summarise, to draw lessons and conclusions. Having plenty of life-data, we now need theories to fit the data. We don't need to wade through more and more data because it merely confirms our established theories, or maybe our biases.

For me, that’s why older people, meaning people over about thirty, don’t need to analyse in detail everything that comes their way. We have enough working material, don’t need too much more, need conclusions more urgently than extra data.

Take climate change for example. It is obvious to anyone with even the most rudimentary analytical capability that the CO2 message has been grossly exaggerated. Scientists who claim their computer models can predict the global temperature thirty years into the future wildly exaggerate both the validity of their theories and the size of their willies their scientific expertise. The claim is silly - obviously silly. Masses and masses of failed forecasts are the data we all have to hand. The theory that fits that data is obvious.

We can't forecast the future.

Apart from extremely regular phenomena, such as the sun rising each morning, the future is uncertain. The climate isn't one of those extremely regular phenomena. Obviously not.

A reasonably experienced, analytically-minded person doesn’t need more graphs, more pictures of melting glaciers, more claims about green energy and green jobs. The ship has sailed. The message is exaggerated, up to its ears in fraud, incompetence, malpractice, dim politicians, failing windmills, electric cars that don't work and to top it all - half-witted celebrities. It's all very sad of course, but surely it's time to move on?

5 comments:

David Duff said...

Not yet, there's still plenty of dosh in it, know wot I mean, John?

Demetrius said...

All it will take is a couple of big volcanoes to go up in short order and all bets are off, perhaps as well as our species,

A K Haart said...

DD - unfortunately true.

D - yes one of the real issues we can't predict either.

James Higham said...

They still have the screws to tighten on us and it's all been so useful so far.

A K Haart said...

JH - yes. It may be time to move on, but will we?