By Robert Matthews, The National

As predictions go, it was truly disturbing - made all the more so by the authority of the source. In 1989, Dr Mustafa Tolba, the head of the UN Environment Programme (Unep), warned that over the coming years as many as 50 million refugees would be wandering the globe to escape the ravages of climate change.

By 2005, Unep felt confident enough to say the 50 million mark would be reached “by 2010”. Other experts agreed, among them the celebrated environmentalist Professor Norman Myers of Oxford University. So where are they? In a word, nowhere. A recent study by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in England found no evidence of any mass migration caused by climate change.

On the contrary, it suggested that - unsurprisingly - people prefer to stay in their own country in the face of environmental upheaval. Unep has tried to disown the prediction, but has succeeded only in sparking a media furore after being caught removing graphics clearly stating “50 million climate refugees by 2010” from its website.

It looks like the agency is learning the truth of the ancient Chinese proverb that “prediction is very difficult - especially of the future”.

It’s unlikely to give up making predictions, though: after all, that’s what expert groups are supposed to do. But as a fascinating new survey of the prediction business shows, we should all be much more sceptical about forecasts - especially those made by experts.

As the journalist Dan Gardner points out in Futurebabble: Why Expert Predictions Fail And Why We Believe Them Anyway, experts have been getting predictions wrong for centuries, for all kinds of reasons.

In 1789, the English economist Thomas Malthus showed with almost mathematical certainty that the world was condemned to mass starvation by the obvious fact that populations increase exponentially, inevitably outstripping food supplies.

Two centuries on, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation figures show that even the least developed nations are enjoying rising food levels. Clearly, Malthus had not banked on the ingenuity of agriculturalists to feed the world.

Everyone makes mistakes, of course, but as Gardner shows, experts are quite often prone to making them.

He cites the results of a pioneering study begun in the 1980s by Professor Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California who brought together hundreds of experts in political science and economics, and asked them to predict what the future might hold.

The result was a collection of more than 27,000 forecasts whose veracity was then checked over the following years. The outcome, published in 2005, was salutary. It showed that the typical expert did not perform significantly better than random guessing.

But Prof Tetlock went further, trying to identify why some experts were so much worse than others. He found that political beliefs or levels of optimism made no difference: a cheery right-winger was just as likely to do badly as a miserable Marxist. Qualifications or access to confidential information did not matter, either.

Far more important, he found, was the mindset that the experts brought to making predictions.

Those who did badly did not like getting bogged down in complexities, or weighing up the evidence from a variety of sources. Instead, they had a habit of making predictions that complied with some grand, overarching thesis. And having made their predictions, they were - ironically enough - strikingly confident about them.

A grand thesis, simple views, confidence ... as Gardner points out, that’s pretty much a thumbnail sketch of the perfect media pundit.

Yet according to Prof Tetlock’s research, those are precisely the characteristics of experts whose predictions are worse than random guessing.

And that, in turn, suggests that the very fact a pundit makes regular media appearances means we can ignore his or her predictions.

Gardner reports how Prof Tetlock put this simple rule to the test using Google hits as a simple way of measuring the “celebrity” of each of the 284 experts who took part in his study. Sure enough, the more famous the expert, the worse his performance.

So if we can’t trust the pundits foisted on us by the media, whom can we trust?

According to Gardner, we should look for experts who do not start from the assumption that some Big Idea (often their Big Idea) is correct. The future has a habit of making a mockery of grand theses. Instead, the starting point should be information gleaned from a wide variety of sources.

Once some broad-brush conclusions have been made, the most reliable forecasters tend to analyse where their conclusions came from. Explaining them to others often helps to reveal assumptions and leaps of faith that just can’t be justified.

The final characteristic to look out for, says Gardner, is simple humility. Anyone with total confidence in their prediction of the future should be treated with suspicion.

Paradoxically, those who say merely that there is a “high chance” of some event happening are more likely to be right than pundits who simply declare “it will”.

And those who make precise, long-term predictions - like, say, 50 million environmental refugees by 2010 - are best ignored completely.

Yet the real problem with forecasting is not so much dodgy pundits, as those who demand to hear them.

Most of us are looking for some certainty in this uncertain world, and we crave the kind of certainty touted by “experts”. Until we wean ourselves off this irrational desire, the law of supply and demand means we will continue to get the pundits we deserve. And that’s a prediction you can totally rely on.

Robert Matthews is visiting reader in science at Aston University, Birmingham, England

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

John Abraham is a professor from Minnesota and John Cook his mirror image from Down Under. Though neither is a climatologist or even meteorologist, both of them have appointed themselves as bishops in the church of anthropogenic global warming. They defend any challenges to the consensus by skeptical scientists. Abraham attacked Monckton is a long diatribe that Chris painstakingly responded to showing John his flawed logic and bad science.

But since the true believers in the church of AGW depend on faith not facts, John claimed victory took his ball and went home. He then appointed himself a leader of the rapid response team where anytime a scientific paper or posting challenging some aspect of the house of cards AGW science, the rapid response time swings into action, proclaiming “no this is wrong, everyone says so”. This is a lot like the Monty Python sketch above where the pet shop clerk repeatedly denies the parrot is dead.

John Cook too has a web site and videos attacking skeptical positions. He claims he was motivated to action by Monckton and others who were calling their baby AGW ugly. He is an adept at putting together videos and very motivated and thus is more dangerous than Abraham in spreading the misinformation and feeding the religious their bread and wine.

Skeptics could have a field day taking apart his attempts at scientific logic, but chose to ignore him. He has a new post, an interview with the co-author of his new book “Climate Change Denial - Head in the Sands”, Haydn Washington, an environmental scientist.

In the interview, John asks Haydn

How do you distinguish between skepticism and denial?

Haydn replies:

They are actually opposites. Skepticism is about looking for the truth, denial is about hiding from it. All scientists should be skeptics, but when you get an overwhelming ‘preponderance of evidence’ from many different types of research, a true scientist will accept it [ a denier won’t. Many climate change deniers call themselves ‘skeptics’ and say the word ‘denier’ is an insult, as if they are ‘holocaust deniers’. However, people can deny anything, but when people deny the fact that every Academy of Science and 97% of practicing climate scientists say human-caused climate change is happening and very serious - it is important to call these people by their true name. They are deniers.

You may recognize the 97% number it comes from a very poorly construct survey Dennis Ambler reported on on SPPI (excerpted below).

We find that they originally contacted 10,257 scientists, of whom 3,146 responded, less than a 31% response rate. “Impending Planetary Doom” was obviously not uppermost in the minds of over two thirds of their target population. Of that number, only 5% described themselves as climate scientists, numbering 157. The authors then further reduced that by half by only counting those who they classed as “specialists”.

“In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2.”

There is little detail of how many peer reviewed papers are needed to qualify as a specialist, it could by their definition be just two papers, one of which needs to be on climate change. What a poor example of scientific enquiry this survey really is. The two questions reported on:

1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?

2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1, The ‘yes’ response to question 2 was 75 specialists out of 77, so here we have our massive 97%.

Of course the way they were worded, I and virtually every real skeptic I know would have answered yes to both. Yes we have warmed since the LIA thankfully and yes population growth from 1.5 to nearly 7 billion in urbanized centers does make a local difference in the climate.

Washington mentions that 97% number numerous times in his interview. It shows how shallow the knowledge Washington, Cook have of the science they defend.

There are many others who are real scientists who also stand up and shout AGW, some no doubt believe it, others are motivated by other things. Jeffrey Skilling, President of Enron, said about his company “...we are a green energy company, but the green stands for money.” That same green greed motivates many in the universities, government at all levels and in industry.

But for those who honestly believe in global warming, cognitive dissonance prevails. They write and holler ‘you are a denier!’ when we point out the errors of their ways and the failures of their models. Yet they are the true deniers. The parrot is dead.

See another skeptic, Jennifer Marohasy in a Brsibane No Carbon Tax Rally:

SPPI Blog

By David A. Patten

Conservative economists, commentators, and politicians are blasting a draft Obama administration plan that envisions using Big Brother-like tracking devices on private cars to tax drivers on how many miles they travel.

The new tax scheme, designed to help fund transportation spending, would determine your mileage by installing electronic equipment on your car. This would involve monitoring your location and how far you’ve traveled.

Fox host Lou Dobbs offered this reaction to the trial balloon on his radio show Thursday: “We’ve got an effective unemployment rate of nearly 17 percent in this country, and these idiots want to tax car mileage. It’s nuts, what they want to do,” he said.

Cato economist Chris Edwards tells Newsmax that the proposal, which he considers “a terrible idea,” is part of the reauthorization of U.S. transportation programs that is expected to occur sometime in the next 12 months. “There is a high degree of risk that there’s going to be all kinds of big government, intrusive stuff in this bill” he warns.

The administration, stung by rising gas prices and an 8-month high in jobless claims Thursday, is backing away from the draft proposal Thursday.

White House spokesperson Jennifer Psaki called the proposed tax “an early working draft proposal that was never formally circulated within the administration.”

The 498-page draft of the administration’s Transportation Opportunities Act was obtained and published by Transportation Weekly.

Psaki told TheHill.com that the draft plan “does not take into account the advice of the president’s senior advisers, economic team or Cabinet officials, and does not represent the views of the president.”

There has been growing momentum in recent months to find a new way to finance transportation spending.

In March, the Congressional Budget Office offered support for taxing drivers based on how many miles they travel. Payment, it suggested, could be collected automatically at service stations.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., also has voiced support for taxing mileage.

The draft of the transportation proposal, which reportedly has been circulated within the Department of Transportation and the Office of Management and Budget, would create a $300 million office within the Federal Highway Administration to be called the “Surface Transportation Revenue Alternatives Office.”

The office would be tasked with defining “the functionality of a mileage based user fee system and other systems,” according to the draft.

One Republican quick to criticize the mileage tax on Thursday: Former GOP Sen. George Allen.

Allen, who is campaigning to represent the Old Dominion in the U.S. Senate, released a statement that: “In our struggling economy, the worst thing Washington can do is raise taxes on middle-class families and small businesses. Yet that is exactly what the latest scheme being floated by Washington Democrats calls for.”

Concerned that increasingly fuel-efficient vehicles will reduce revenue from current gasoline taxes, state officials in Oregon, Iowa, Nevada, and Texas already are considering tax proposals based on mileage driven.

In Minnesota, the state department of transportation is conducting a research project that would use smart phones with a GPS application to monitor mileage. Critics point out, however, that taxing drivers based on miles driven rather than gallons consumed would decrease their incentive to purchase more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Quite apart from the economic issues are the privacy concerns. Allen labeled the tax an “onerous, big brother proposal.”

Edwards, the editor of DownsizingGovernment.org, tells Newsmax: “There’s clearly a potential for privacy abuses with such a system, government tracking American citizens driving around in their cars. These government data bases have often been hacked and leaked. So there’s a big privacy concern here.”

The draft proposal calls for field trials to test the feasibility of the mileage tax, but does not specify when or where those trials would occur.

Read more on Newsmax.com: White House Wants to Track and Tax Your Mileage