Why Govt. Scientists Never Pay A Price For Their Bad Forecasts
You can read the full version of this 10-year-old news story on the website of Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper by clicking here.
Disastrous global warming didn’t happen five years ago, in 2014. It isn’t happening today, either. Yet Penny Sackett continues to chair Australia’s ACT Climate Change Council.
click for source
Does anyone else see a problem here? You can be dead wrong. I mean, really bleeping wrong. About something really important. And still get described, on an Australian government website, as a champion of evidence-based decision making.
In the universe Sackett inhabits, there are evidently no consequences to getting important things wrong. You merely jump from one government sinecure to another.
A few years ago you were Australia’s chief scientist. Now you run Australia’s climate council. Ho-hum.
. . . . .
The claim, in that decade-old news story, about Australians being “among the world’s biggest producers of carbon dioxide” is rubbish. Australia isn’t even in the top 10 of the highest-emitting nations.
It emits less than 1.5% of the grand total. Just four countries – China, America, India, and Russia – are jointly responsible for more than 50%.
Even if you believe there’s a direct relationship between carbon dioxide and global warming (I personally think there’s serious evidence to the contrary), Australia’s total emissions don’t matter. They’re trivial.
That entire country could shut down tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect the big picture. Australia could crash its economy, health system, and educational infrastructure overnight.
It could plunge its population into misery and deprivation. And the effect on the climate would be irrelevant. There would be extraordinary pain for absolutely no gain.
It’s only if you look at emissions per capita, that Australia makes it onto the top 10 list of baddies, at position #10. This is due to matters beyond the control of ordinary people: Australia’s vast landmass, its sparse population (25 million), and its abundant natural resources.
If you’re producing less than 1.5% of total global emissions, and your country’s entire population is smaller than some cities, it doesn’t matter how many sacrifices you make. They’re meaningless.
Only governments, politicians, and bureaucrats – people who live in fantasy land and never pay any professional price for behaving foolishly – could imagine otherwise.
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JaKo
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Sinecure — governments and very large corporations:
There have been “studies” (real, ‘unreal’ and imaginary) about the selection of candidates for promotion based on success, failure and random; where random seems to have an edge over the other two in terms of performance.
As for false prediction being rewarded — there may have been punitive measures taken (causalities), but not in the leadership; the e.g. committee which fed that particular prediction to her (Dr. Sackett) may be gone, who knows…
While I’m not seeking Ig Nobel Price, I have a theory that if, by chance, a very competent and honest person gets to head a major department in a large institution, there’s very real chance that this person could expose the waste in this institution’s structure and, if the other C-suites don’t pay attention, this person may even eliminate all that extravagance and rattle the cages of the other bosses — a very painful process, BTW…
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Joseph Olson
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Meteorology, another pseudoscience that can’t correctly guess anything a day in advance, does have some creative excuses for their failure. In the midst of a prolonged drought, one forecaster promised “90% chance of rain, most getting +2″ overnight”. When his ratings driven hope open failed, he apologized saying….
“THE WEATHER UNDER PERFORMED YESTERDAY”
(kinda like AGW has done for 20 years)
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James McGinn
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JO:
Meteorology, another pseudoscience
JMcG:
you don’t know the half of it:
Solving Tornadoes: Woke Meteorology
https://anchor.fm/james-mcginn
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Andy Rowlands
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We can’t even accurately predict the weather more than a few days in advance, yet we are supposed to believe computer models up to a century in the future? The whole thing is bloody ridiculous.
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