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August 4, 2023

The book, The Plague of Models: How Computer Modeling Corrupted Environmental, Health, and Safety Regulations by Kenneth Green, is banned by Amazon. I don’t think Amazon bans many books. They don’t have time to read them all. The book is available at Barnes and Noble.

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The Plague of Models is a wide-ranging attack on a broad spectrum of government regulation and policy, including alleged cancer-causing substances, air pollution, and doomsday predictions like global warming, acid rain, and the ozone hole. It is also an attack on the scientists who use computer models incorrectly to generate scientific results, better known as the computer slogan “Garbage In Garbage Out ‘ (GIGO).

Scientists want to generate important-sounding, even sensational results. They want to be famous and enjoy the benefits of higher social status. That desire leads to stretching or breaking the rules. For example, hunting through data for a supported hypothesis, or data dredging, is a temptation that breaks the statistics. There are many other temptations.

I think Green is a bit soft on the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The doomsday climate models used by the IPCC accept climate inputs for previous decades and output a simulated climate. The closer the past simulated climate is to the past measured climate, the better the model, according to their methodology. The models are then run with estimated future climate inputs in order to generate a projected future climate. The official projected future climate is obtained by averaging together results from a dozen or so climate models, models that strongly disagree with each other.

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The danger is that models that have many adjustable parameters are primarily doing curve fitting to make the past climate projections agree with past measured climate. If the models are little more than very complicated curve-fitting engines, their predictive power would be nil. The averaging of results from diverse climate models has been justified on the grounds that it gives better agreement with past measured climate. If the models are curve-fitting engines, it is expected that averaging diverse models gives better results due to averaging of random and uncorrelated errors.

The various models don’t always use the same climate inputs, because important inputs, such as aerosols, are poorly quantified. Kevin Trenbreth, probably the most important scientist on the climate alarmist side of the argument and one-time head of modeling at the National Center for Atmospheric Research  (NCAR), said this about the models:

 “None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate.”

The models are modeling an imaginary world, not the Earth.

The organizations and people touting climate doomsday are highly political. They embrace climate doom because it is a useful tool in their quest to remake society while hiding their subversive intentions. It doesn’t matter if the predictions are junk science if they can be presented as solid science via propaganda.

A simple doomsday model that until recently had many believers was devised by Thomas Malthus in 1798. Malthusianism is based on the idea that population grows exponentially, like a bank account yielding compound interest, while food production grows much more slowly. Food production has grown at an astounding rate. For example, in 100 years, corn yields grew seven times and wheat three times. However fast the production of food grows, exponential population growth would eventually swamp it. But in the developed world negative population growth has become widespread, China having one of the worst problems. In response China is promoting the three-child family. It’s not working. An exponentially shrinking population creates the problem of an inverted population pyramid with too few young workers to support the larger retired cohort.