Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Of computer models, the financial crisis and climate change

Excellent letter in this morning's Oz by Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University.


DAVID Murray, a former CEO of the Commonwealth Bank and chairman of the Future Fund, has rumbled ("Aussie banks to ride out storm”, 19/9) that a major cause of the current global financial crisis has been an over-reliance on complex financial computer models. Murray notes that “in the US, some of the brightest people that have come out of the greatest universities have been employed on broken models in investment banking ...”

It is the case, also, that unvalidated computer projections produced by very clever programmers are now about the only argument left to the IPCC that dangerous human-caused global warming is going to occur, leaving aside that the real world has been cooling since 2002. Meanwhile, Ross Garnaut has announced that on October 3 he will outline the shape of a future low-emissions economy for Australia. In support of the findings and recommendations in his Final Report, Garnaut will describe “one of the most ambitious and complex economic modelling projects ever undertaken in Australia”, which he claims “will describe the nature of future structural change across the economy with mitigation policies in place”.

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he, but who ever is going to believe a word of it?
As this post here at Ambit Gambit observes, the tie up between the current financial melt-down and climate hysteria is the reliance by both on computer models that do not reflect the real world.

Even the IPCC admits this, and yet we are going to engage in the multi-trillion dollar upending of the global economy.

Complete madness.

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