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A Question for My Fellow Ricochetti
I’ve got a question I’m trying to answer, and it occurs to me that someone here might be able to help me. One of the things I like most about Ricochet is the thoughtfulness and intelligence of the members. Another thing that impresses me is the diversity of this crowd. So I’m going to toss this out there and see if anyone has any thoughts to offer.
I wrote a post not too long ago about the need for a civil dialog across the political divide. A fellow in New York City, one of these young, hyper-educated computer entrepreneur types, read it and invited me to participate in a new podcast he’s launching soon. He wants his first episode to feature someone from the left and someone from the right holding a civil discussion on matters about which they disagree.
The person on the left is another hyper-educated individual — Ph.D. from MIT in machine learning, something like that — who recently left Google to found a climate change advocacy organization in D.C. I’m the person on the right. We’re going to have a civil conversation, which I am going to assume will be centered around climate change, though that hasn’t actually been stated. The conference call will take place this Wednesday afternoon.
This isn’t intended to be a debate, but rather a conversation, a discussion, a meeting of minds. That’s the hope, anyway: ideally, we’ll each come away understanding the other’s perspective a little better. I’m an old dog, and I can’t honestly say that I want or expect my own views to change. (I think that’s probably true of most people, old dogs or not.) But I intend to do my best to listen, and to take a pleasant, non-confrontational tone.
I’ll get to my question for you in a moment.
My general thinking on climate change is pretty simple, and goes as follows:
- I’m agnostic about anthropogenic climate change. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we’re warming the planet; might surprise me a little if we aren’t.
- I’m skeptical that we can project with any significant confidence the state of the climate 80 years from now, but I’m willing to entertain the possibility that we’re getting very good at modeling the complex dynamic system we call climate.
- I am more than skeptical that we can effectively model the several other complex dynamic systems involved in making cost/benefit analyses of various climate change mitigation strategies over a similar time scale. These include patterns of land use, agricultural production, technological evolution, urbanization, global distribution of poverty, etc. Eighty years is a very long time in terms of technological and economic development. (Step back to 1940 and imagine what futurists thought 2020 would be like; how much do you think they got right?)
- Given that I believe we can’t realistically evaluate the economic consequences of climate change 80 years from now, perhaps not even the sign of those consequences, I can not begin to justify imposing large-scale controls on current energy policy. While it’s difficult to model complex systems, history is full of examples of what happens when you create concentrated authoritarian control structures — and that’s what would be required to transform our energy economy as the climate change alarmists seem to desire.
I am ignoring two things, both of which are important in the discussion but neither of which is central to my argument. One is the impracticality of actually changing the future climate in a predictable way — at least, of doing so without crippling the global economy. The other is nuclear power, which I believe all climate change alarmists should eagerly embrace — believe so strongly that I distrust the motives or the intelligence (or both) of any climate change alarmist who doesn’t support nuclear power.
So my argument revolves around the assertion that we are not capable of making reliable long-term predictions about complex systems, and that climate mitigation strategies require us to make such predictions about several independent but linked complex dynamic systems. My question is this:
What examples do we have of anyone making successful predictions of the long-term behavior of complex systems?
Say that long-term is on the order of 50 years, give or take. Complex systems are “complex” in a relatively formal way, involving multiple interacting factors that are difficult to measure, the interactions of which may be poorly understood, chaotic, and involve feedback mechanisms.
Economies, political and social movements, markets, and technology-driven change all exhibit the behavior of complex systems. They are difficult to predict because they involve a lot of independent elements (often, people) making individual contributions based on an evolving range of factors. They are difficult to precisely describe, precisely measure, and accurately predict over any but the shortest time frames. They may exhibit sudden and chaotic changes in response to relatively small inputs (the shooting of an Archduke, for example).
In contrast, sending a rocket to the moon, designing a super-computer, making the next breakthrough in material science or battery technology or solar power or advanced medical imaging — all of these things may be complicated, but they are not complex. They are achieved by solving a large number of well-defined problems, with each solution contributing to the final goal. These systems are not characterized by chaotic behavior, subtle feedback loops, or factors that are difficult to define or measure.
We are very good at making predictions about non-complex systems, even fairly complicated ones, over pretty much any time frame. But I can think of no truly complex system about which we’ve ever successfully made an accurate long-term prediction. Hence my question.
Any thoughts?
Published in General
Warming or cooling can’t be explained simply by actions here on earth. It takes our solar system about 230 million years to revolve around our galaxy the Milky Way. Try to cope with the complexity of that. If you think that doesn’t effect our small planet you have no imagination . Forces beyond our comprehension come into play. The earth is bound by the rules of the literally countless objects in the Milky Way and beyond.
Scale down your thinking to something as mundane as the wheel bearing in your car. One small imperfection during the manufacturing process of just one part of the bearing and your walking instead of riding. So our solar system is so put together as not to have variances? I have walked because of a simple wheel bearing. So one year or decade or century or for that matter millennium must be constant? I might not be brilliant ( I am not) but I have imagination beyond thinking CO2 is poison and is dooming civilization. So try reason with your adversary, and if it doesn’t work talk to a brick you’ll have as much effect.
Hank, I can’t immediately think of any accurate predictions. Three very inaccurate predictions come to mind:
1. The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich (1968), which predicted widespread famine in the 1970s and 1980s.
2. The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome (1972), which predicted resource depletion and economic collapse.
3. The 1961 edition of Economics: an Introductory Analysis by Economist Paul Samuelson (a later Nobel Laureate), which predicted that Soviet GNP would surpass the US between 1984 and 1997.
You might be able to find more accurate predictions by looking for critiques of these.
The 1965 Moynihan Report (about the black family) may be a pretty good prediction, though I don’t think that it made numerical projections. It generally predicted that black illegitimacy would hinder black progress toward economic and political equality.
Check out Coyote Blog and click on his Climate Skeptic section. He has done a LOT of posts on this topic and links to a lot of other sites. I find it an interesting blog for a lot of reasons (although he’s a little too obsessed with Tesla for me).
Nada.
But this:
The trouble will all of these efforts is that left and right don’t just disagree philosophically about ways to attack the problems of the world, but we disagree on the facts surrounding these problems. And since the facts in dispute have scientists on either side, the tools and techniques of science are under attack, as is the scientific method itself.
Case in point: are models science? In my now-ancient training, models are tools used in the formulation of hypotheses, and used in the design of experiments to test those hypotheses against reality. Nowadays, it has become fashionable to present the models themselves. Climate science and epidemiology are rife with such. The role of reality vs. the models is almost an afterthought, especially when reality doesn’t play along.
The ClimateGate scandal back in 2003 was driven by modelers. We learned that Michael Mann and his buddies in East Anglia tortured the “Principle Components Analysis” statistical method to justify cherry-picking the datasets that made up their reconstruction of historical temperatures. (By tortured, I mean deliberately misapplied it.) Why? Because climate modelers needed to erase the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Datasets containing the MWP and LIA used to “train” climate models didn’t produce forecasts of catastrophic warming from human activity. Train those models with Michael Mann’s hockey stick and presto!, Man-Made Disaster Cometh!
McIntyre and McKitrick busted Michael Mann’s hockey stick, and an unknown whistleblower busted East Anglia’s efforts to resuscitate it, so later IPCC technical reports were much saner. But the activists needed something to work with, and James Hansen’s buddies in NOAA obliged: the long-term records for ground weather stations in the US and cooperating countries around the world started to acquire some unusual adjustments. Using claims that adjustments were needed to account for methodological errors and for the Urban Heat Island effect, much of the early 20th century was suddenly cooler, and the late 20th century and the 21st century got warmer. Woo-hoo! A new training dataset was again available for the modelers to get suitably catastrophic predictions. Somehow the “corrections” are opposite of what one would do to adjust for the Urban Heat Island effect. Anthony Watts exposed this a few years ago.
Judy Curry, former head of Environmental Sciences at Georgia Tech, was one of the early members of the Global Warming Team to break ranks after the shenanigans were exposed. Her site is particularly valuable.
I hope you can use some of the above in your discussion, but I predict that your moderator is not going to be neutral if you bring any of this up.
I agree with all the comments on nuclear power, I would add, too, that anyone worried about CO2 emissions should advocate for natural gas. Only emission is water. What’s not to love?
Second point is that we have allowed leftists to decouple climate predictions from weather predictions, which is just silly. As someone who lives in Hurricane Alley, I’ll begin taking climate change predictions seriously when someone, anyone can tell me how many named storms will hit FL in any given year. They can’t. But weather is different than climate. Sure it is. “Climate” is amorphous enough and long term enough that you can make any prediction you want, without any eventual accountability.
The question was:
What examples do we have of anyone making successful predictions of the long-term behavior of complex systems?
The reason no examples have been offered is because the question is almost tautological. If we could successfully model and predict these systems, we would largely no longer consider them complex.
Long-term climate predictions are especially troublesome because there is a nesting of complex systems. We know, for example, that sun activity, ocean currents, and cloud formations (to name but a few) influence climate in dramatic ways. But we don’t understand any of them well enough to predict them. Each is a complex, long-term puzzle unto itself. If we can’t predict these components, good luck predicting any system that relies on them. This is why the margin of error on these climate models is so large that they are almost meaningless. (Alarmist always use the most extreme numbers.) And because catastrophic climate change theory is premised upon all these key subsystems compounding quickly over time, the margin of error expands exponentially over time as well. Even if they were accurate as a snapshot in time, the margin of error on these predictions soon (within a decade or two) becomes so large that they predict nothing reliable or meaningful.
One tangential point. Your bullets in the OP accept the assumption that an increase in temperature is a net negative. This isn’t at all clear, and some scientists believe a couple of degree increase in average temperatures would be a net positive.
Zafar, that’s an interesting thought. I’m aware of no efforts to make actual long-range predictions about the socioeconomic development of a planned city, but you may have hit upon one of the more complex examples of planning. Given that planned cities predate modern modeling technology, I’m going to guess it was wing-and-a-prayer kind of stuff that didn’t attempt to be rigorous.
Jim, thank you. I’ve been following Dr. Curry for years, since her days at Georgia Tech, and I visit her blog regularly. Your suggestions regarding Paul Ehrlich and his famously bad predictions were, unsurprisingly, the first things to come to mind when I thought about failed prognostication. I’m amused by the thought that my interlocutors in Wednesday’s discussion are both likely too young to have any recollection of The Population Bomb or Ehrlich’s famous bet with Julian Simon. I think any discussion of predictive fails should start with Ehrlich and continue with the peak oil alarmists who were sounding the alarm more than a hundred years ago and haven’t stopped yet.
Miffed, that sounds like it would be a great thing to have handy. Unfortunately, I find Jonah’s brand of smugly juvenile commentary unpleasant, so I eschew his podcast; I’ll have to give this a pass.
Jenna, that’s an excellent suggestion. The downside is that folks on the left probably mistake the causes of the social pathology that (in my opinion) arose from the Great Society programs as what BLM et al are busy telling everyone is really the cause: racism. So it would be hard to point to that as what it is, a failure of central planning. But there are other conspicuously failed large-scale government programs, particularly behind the iron curtain, that should serve as undeniable examples of the failures of long-term central planning.
OB, thanks for taking the time to organize and post that information. I’m pretty well read on climate change, having followed with a geeky layman’s interest for decades. But I’m aware that I’ll be talking to well-educated technocrats who devote vast amounts of time to the issue, all from a trust-the-science perspective. So I don’t want to try to take on the science. There’s just no way to do that in a way that will persuade an audience. Climate science has way too much momentum behind it to fall to an amateur’s frontal assault.
On the other hand, I’m not really interested in attacking climate science, per se. Rather, I want to communicate skepticism about all of the other complex systems that have to be understood and accurately predicted in order to evaluate various responses to the predictions of the climate change crowd. If getting it right with one complex system is hard (and I’m skeptical that they have), getting it right with five or six complex interwoven systems is vastly harder — particularly as those systems have not enjoyed the funding of climate science, nor are they predicated on relatively simple physics and chemistry.
That’s the crux of my argument: I’m not merely skeptical that we can cost-justify radical intervention now, I simply reject the notion that we can make a credible case for the claim, and I challenge the change-prevention crowd to make the case that they can do the near impossible well enough to justify so much authoritarianism.
That’s interesting. Betting on human nature remaining unchanged, and on the likelihood that our lesser angels will eventually express themselves, does always seem a safe bet. That’s a reasonable argument against both socialism and libertarianism, in my opinion. But I don’t think it will fit in the discussion at hand. ;)
That leans toward the complicated side, I think: generally speaking, physics is easy. There are only a few hundred billion stars to consider, and we think we know the rules pretty well (ignoring hypothetical dark matter, etc.). This is the kind of thing we’re actually pretty good at.
All, thank you again.
I think we can add predictions regarding COVID-19 to this list.
STAT! Get and read Wayne Raymond, Climate Change in Davis, California, ISBN 9781973260479, and Raymond, California Climate Change: Carbon Dioxide: Unjustly Villified, ISBN 9781652437727. The geographical scope is small, the the data show what is actually going on, and has been for decades, and not what the computer models say will happen (but never does). There’s a phrase I heard a lot, oh 40 or 50 years ago, but I haven’t heard in almost the same amount of time: “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” And here’s a problem when dealing with computer geniuses. They think their computers are the answer to everything, and don’t take well to “GIGO” anymore. They do not like to hear that their computers can be wrong.
He will probably bring up the California wildfires. The August Complex just went over one million acres. It was the third largest fire in U.S. history. Not sure where it stands now. But land managers have been trying to tell politicians and academics for decades, as they pushed their “environmental” agendas, “you’re not going to like this.” These movements actually started before climate change, before global warming, during the time of the coming ice age. The current situation really began with the Endangered Species Act in 1973. The California wildfires are NOT the result of climate change. They’re the (predicted) product of decades of poor land management. It’s so obvious that you have to be a “scientist” beholdin’ to the government for funding, not to see it.
Here’s more perspective, a thread I wrote here several years ago: https://ricochet.com/?s=The+Day+The+World+changed. Note that “The Big Blow-up” happened on August 20, 1910!
In this case, it would seem especially strange if we could understand the macro level despite continued failure to understand the micro level after a century of much more intense research and financial incentives at that smaller level.
I refer of course to weather prediction for local communities. Meteorologists remain little better than farmers at predicting local weather for the next day or next week. If city and county weathermen provide little value beyond what any user of a weather app with radar, satellite imagery, and pressure systems can determine, then it seems an extraordinary claim to believe modelers of global climate patterns can do better.
Indeed, their predictions of global climate changes have proven consistently wrong. The purpose of science is to understand phenomena through observation and repeatable experiments. If the theories provide no predictive value, it’s bad science.
Furthermore, one major pyroclastic (volcanic) eruption drops temperatures more in just a year or two than today’s climate “scientists” claim to have recorded after a decade of human activity. Humanity’s influence is evidently insignificant compared with natural forces.
Furthermore, the US surpassed Kyoto standards without us binding our nation to the accord. So-called “green” projects abound — some of them spear-headed by the oil industry, which is more accurately an energy industry that follows the money. Where is the Left’s appreciation?
Godspeed. I had this conversation with a lefty friend who works at Stanford alongside Peter and others of the Hoover Institute. She accepted no premise. “Climate change” is a cult movement.
I hope at some point you at least challenge them to explain why “global warming” became “climate change”, as if any change in either direction is evidence of impending doom. Science, my foot.
Free, yes, I agree. Enough is understood about complex systems to make me comfortable taking the stand that skepticism of our long-range predictions is the only responsible position.
My fourth point includes the comment that we aren’t even sure of “the sign of those [economic] consequences….” That was intended to address what you just observed. Perhaps I should have expanded on that, as it may have been unclear.
A thought has occurred to me as I’ve considered the climate science community’s enthusiasm for and trust in models. I understand the unique challenge of trying to perform a controlled, repeatable experiment with the global climate system, and the need therefor to attempt to approximate such experiments using models. I get that, and I can accept that we may have to compromise on rigor just a little (okay, a lot) in order to at least try to test theories.
The models are improving, if a convergence on observed warming is any indication — assuming that our historical temperature record is at all accurate, reasonably complete, and not overly massaged into compliance with expectations (thank you, Mr. Mann), assuming that urban heat islands haven’t completely distorted the record, assuming that we’re getting a meaningful aggregate global energy reading from our satellite data and our increasing but still spotty oceanographic coverage, etc., etc.
The models predict a modest temperature increase, not a fall-off-the-cliff catastrophe. But the excitement in the climate change crisis camp revolves around prospect of an existential crisis, a major ice sheet failure, a clathrate breakdown in the floor of the north Atlantic, or some other positive feedback mechanism run amok.
So what we’re seeing is a strange fusion of arguably accurate modeling — at least, modeling that is likely improving in accuracy — combined with hypothetical one-off events that shift the outcome from manageable to existentially catastrophic. That’s a problem for climate alarmists, because the same rigor and testability (e.g., by running against historical data) isn’t possible with the one-off, runaway events. They remain pure conjecture; one might as well argue that increased volcanic activity in the next half century could undo all of our CO2-driven warming.
I’m not sure that’s a sound line of reasoning for me to take — it might actually encourage a greater sense of urgency for some people. I don’t know. I’ll think about it.
I noticed that too.
The question in bold
is one worth pondering. My immediate response is that there are belief systems that do a fairly good job of predicting the long-term behavior of human beings. Judaism and Christianity, for instance, (IMHO) but these have been constructed over centuries of close observation of human behavior in the context of vigorous competition from other belief systems. In no real sense, outside the fantasies of Margaret Atwood, have adherents to these systems been able to exert the kind of complete control that climate change activists believe is not only necessary but (absurdly) also possible.
You could invite your interlocutor to look at a smaller, far less debatable situation involving inevitable natural catastrophe and human response-ability.
Right now, scientists predict, with genuine unanimity, that the Cascadian Subduction Zone—a fault lying ten miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest—is overdue for ructions. When the CSZ “goes,” the result will be a massive, 9.2+ earthquake and tsunami. There is nothing theoretical or model-driven about this: We know about subduction zone earthquakes, we’ve seen them with our own eyes and we know what a tsunami can do.
So here is an obvious, settled-science, predictable and predicted catastrophe providing an illustration of the way actual human beings, already organized under a government system with powers in place, respond to risk, or fail to respond even when the sacrifice involved is minimal. Or, when compared with essentially taking over the management of an entire planet, infinitesimal.
There is a small, Pacific Northwest community filled with culturally homogeneous, educated, modern, well-fed people (most of whom, now that I think of it, probably have “Science Is Real” signs in their front yards). There is a hospital that serves this community, but the building was built before the threat of the CSZ was understood. It is located within the inundation zone, meaning that when—not if—the one-two punch of earthquake+tusnami hits, the hospital will be under water. Remember, the building is outdated anyway. A new one clearly called for.
Involved in this situation are really easy, obvious facts, ones that do not require advanced degrees in Science to grasp:
1.) Even if a building is “earthquake-proofed,” the subsequent tsunami will drown people and wreck stuff. There is no way to stop a tsunami; the only way to prevent mass casualties is to evacuate out of the inundation zone.
2.) Hospitals are very difficult to evacuate because of all the sick people inside them
3.) Hospitals are also very helpful to have in the aftermath of a natural disaster, preferably dry, intact and functioning.
4.) Did I mention that the hospital has to be re-built anyway?
5.) Blindingly obvious solution? Build a new hospital well outside the inundation zone.
All of the above—items 1-5—- was understood. Nobody disputed any of it. And yet…the new hospital was built in exactly the same spot as the old one had been. Still inside the inundation zone.
Not only are climate change activists proposing to understand and predict incredibly complex, interdigitated natural and human systems, but they imagine that they (or some supernaturally beneficent subset) will be able to control these systems, not just for a few years but for decades and centuries. That is, control people.
To which those relatively accurate predictors of human behavior —Jewish, Christian, Buddhist—would say “yeah. Good luck with that.”
This is a must to protect yourself from the left’s twists and turns reporting what you said.
Also, ask him to establish a baseline… what is the earth’s normal temperature? For without this baseline, all else is opinion. Also, ask him to establish the earth’s normal CO2 level and the optimum CO2 level for plant growth. Of course, they can’t.
Homestead, Florida, just south of Miami, is built on a coral reef so it obviously was under water by many feet in the past. One needs to rent an auger to plant a mail box or bushes there. I know from experience.
Nurseries pump in extra CO2 because growing plants thrive better with it rather than the normal air.
They will never be convinced. Read Lomborg. He isn’t convinced, either, but argues adapting is better than preventing, both realistically and economically.
Uh, no. Natural Gas is Methane, CH4. 1 Methane plus 2 O2 => 1 CO2 and 2 H2O.
Natural gas is, however, the carbon-based fuel that yields the least CO2 for the energy output.
The fuel that yields only water is hydrogen. In quantity, hydrogen is manufactured from natural gas, so with the conversion efficiency loss it is actually worse than natural gas. (:
I read somewhere that there is no proof of abnormal worming. All they have are various models. There is no computer in existence that can calculate all the variables that drive climate.
Aren’t any. Would need several thousand years to see if the predictions were accurate, based on the earth’s warming and cooling, and even millions of years to be sure. There is no computer in existence that can model all the climate forcing agents, solar, oceans, land, volcanic…..
That’s kinda what I was trying to get at =p
Basically, Global Warming scientists are setting up computer models as prophets that we can’t falsify or verify in our lifetimes.
And also volcanoes that erupt on the ocean floor have a dramatically opposite effect–they boost the water temperature, which then of course affects air currents above.
Geological events absolutely affect weather over the short and long term.
I have to agree strongly with everyone who has pointed to the past year’s statistical probability calculations in relation to the pandemic. That is the most obvious example right now. It was a very expensive response to scientific models that proved to be inaccurate in the end.
If there were any obvious reason to not pursue anything other than contingent planning for climate-warming trends being observed, it’s what we’ve watched this past year.
On February 25, 2020, based on statistical modeling predictions, the stock market, taking those early predictions seriously, dropped $1.7 trillion in one day. Let us not be that foolish again.
And by the way, the stock market offers daily opportunities to observe statistical modeling. :-) There are two approaches to investing: one is based on the Graham and Dodd securities (company and industry) analysis method and the other is based on technical analysis–simply watching the trends in the market day by day. There are things investors can learn from both.
And then there is the entire actuarial industry. :-) Modeling the future is all they do all day. :-)
By your definition of complex systems, we have only been able to model them since the computer was developed, roughly the last fifty years.
Now that I think about statistical modeling, every natural and manmade disaster is basically a failure of complex system modeling. We think of these events as disasters because the consequences are so great and so expensive, and we didn’t think the disasters would happen. That’s why the projects proceeded.
Whether we’re talking about the Challenger blowing up or the Boeing plane crashes two years ago, scientists missed something somewhere in their prediction calculations as to what would work and what would fail.
Let’s get more global for a moment. If you do this discussion that is supposed to be rational and civil between someone on the right and someone on the left, keep a stopwatch handy. Time how long it takes for the lefty to interrupt and talk over you. My prediction is less than one minute into the conversation. The second the other person interrupts, you stop talking and let them speak, then watch how long it takes the other person to notice that you stopped. I believe that no leftist can carry on a civil conversation without being in charge.
And @marcin beat me to the example of the many models of pandemic behavior that have been almost completely wrong from the outset.
Actually, no Boss, sorry to say. Natural gas is a simple hydrocarbon and burning it does oxidize carbon and create CO2. What it does avoid are all the other nasty byproducts that your average catalytic converter attempts to break down into less nasty bits. Hydrogen cells on the other hand oxydize hydrogen, creating water as the sole emission. The problem is the hydrogen itself, so volatile it is something of a bomb. If you get in a wreck and gas spills out, an exposion may result, but maybe not. If a hydrogen cell is ruptured however, BOOM!
@philturmel in #34 covered a lot of what I would have said and has some very good links.
I am not a climate scientist, but have developed models – and control systems based on them – for my entire career. The first thing is to make sure you have good data and that is one area where climate ‘science’ has fallen down. My first introduction to the climate controversy was when I was following McIntyre’s blog, since he showed all of his data and algorithms in the statistical language ‘R’. He had tried to get the data and algorithms used for modelling climate and was told “Why should we do that, you will only try to find something wrong with our results?”. That is the point of science.
The climategate scandal showed how fiercely the climate ‘in-crowd’ fought to keep out any papers that disagreed with the ‘consensus’.
But to me, the fundamental problem is the data. One interesting site is http://www.surfacestations.org/ which shows results based on a crowd sourced survey of US temperature monitoring stations and how the location has changed due to local changes.
Because the grants seem to go to those predicting the worse future, the climate ‘science’ isn’t science.
One of my favorite plots is the following “Hockey Stick” of temperature vs time.
Note that the Y scale is the change in the historical data by NASA since 2001.
Good luck !
As noted by our resident chaplain in #41, religious belief systems can make accurate long-term predictions of complex systems (individual, family, tribal, and societal behaviors) over long periods of time (lifespans, generations, empires, millenia). Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, there are strikingly prescient descriptions of contemporary phenomena that were recorded thousands of years ago.
What enables these stories to speak to us across the centuries in recognizable ways? Human nature, our drives and motivations, and responses to conflict and opportunity, is predictable. Mankind is neither infintely malleable nor perfectable, and thus we can make reasonable long-term predictions of how people in the main react to situations.
And yet, the progressive mode of thought rejects the premise of fixed human nature. The “New Soviet Man” held and holds powerful attraction to some. And it is precisely that remolding of human wants and fears that would be needed for the level of societal control required to implement megaschemes like global climate control.
Our best proven long range predictions of the behavior of complex systems rely on the bounded randomness of predictable humans, which inherently cannot implement the Utopian visions.
Yeh.
I think clearly they DON’T know that. (And they probably don’t WANT TO know it, either.)
Hence the pessimism I expressed in comment #1.
I think he should hook them up with Bjorn Lomborg.