Bishop Hill The climate Cassandra
Aug 18, 2010 Climate: WG2 Climate: other Climatologist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute is interviewed in Spiegel. The interviewer even tries a few challenging questions:
SPIEGEL: As climate adviser to the chancellor, you have a particularly high profile. Because of your frequently ominous predictions, critics have dubbed you the "Cassandra of Potsdam," after the figure in Greek mythology whose predictions always went unheard. Why do you always have to scare people?
Schellnhuber: Let me answer your provocative question in an objective way. As an expert, it's possible that I tend to point to dangers and risks more than to opportunities and possibilities -- similarly to an engineer who builds a bridge and has to make people aware of everything that could cause it to collapse. Warning against a possible accident is in fact intended to reduce the likelihood of an accident. And a sudden shift in the climate could have truly catastrophic consequences. Besides, in Greek mythology Cassandra was always right -- unfortunately.
SPIEGEL: Does that justify constantly predicting the end of the world?
Schellnhuber: Naturally, we have to be careful not to dramatize things. After all, scientific credibility is our unique selling point. But I do confess that when you have the feeling that people just aren't listening, it becomes very tempting to turn up the volume. Naturally, we have to resist this temptation.
Reader Comments (40)
Conclusion from Schellnhuber: Ultimately only democratic societies will be able to master this challenge, notwithstanding their torturous decision-marking processes. But to get there perhaps we'll need innovative refinement of our democratic institutions. I could imagine assigning 10 percent of all seats in parliament to ombudsmen who represent only the interests of future generations.
So we will need a democracy in which the representatives are appointed by the priestly caste, rather than elected, to be achieved by "innovative refinement of our democratic institutions". In the wacky world of climate science, black truly is white.
Somehow this reminds me of a recent article in the economist about Sarkozy, Merkel and European diplomacy. The final remark was:
Natürlich, it also applies to the Germans now.
"similarly to an engineer who builds a bridge and has to make people aware of everything that could cause it to collapse."
How about a scientist who points out all the things that could refute his theory?
Don't see too much of that in climate science, square peg, round hole.
What's the German word for "prick"?
He says he's a physicist, but he sounds more like a politician. I wouldn't trust his science any more than I would trust a politician.
I'm sure that most bridge builders explain the risks in a bridge by starting off saying there is a 95% (modeled) probability that the bridge will fail sometime in the next 100 years. So it's best to shut down the bridge now ...just as a precaution.
That "10 percent of all seats" for "future generations" is the wackiest thing I have heard proposed. I wonder how the 10 percent of people selected for this duty in 1900 would have planned their(our) schedule?
If someone suggested that 10 percent of political power should be kept aside for the earthly representatives of spirits of previous generations, I'm sure they would be rightly dismissed as either idiots or manipulative charlatans. I see no difference with Schellnhubers idea, in both cases it is unearned power they are after.
Steve2, the idea was first discussed by G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy.
Chesterton was mad, of course, but at least he could write properly.
Blimey! He might just as well have said: "I used to be conceited but now I'm perfect"!
Mustn't dramatize? unique selling point? tempting to turn up the volume?
Bull-shit writ large, that is all "they've" been doing for years.
Ears that hear loud noise long enough turn deaf!
Don't you just love the word 'expert'?
An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less; finally he knows everthing about nothing
The other definition is: X represents the unknown; a spurt is a drip under pressure
Tony
Expert:
Ex - former
Spurt - drip under pressure
dearieme:
the German equivalent you are looking for could be der (or du) schwanz...
Steve2
Caligula made his horse, Inciatus, a consul, Chavez keep an empty seat at the Venezuelan Parliament for Simon Bolivar, and this guy is expert advisor to the German government...
Oh well...
"They're not exaggerations, but a condensing of information."
I liked that. There's no shame is there? None.
Schnellhubris
In a more constructive way, an economist may point to the implicit (high) rate of discount applied to the interests of future generations by assigning them merely 10 seats in the German Parliament.
The Stern report was famous for applying different discount rates for different purposes, according to convenience, including a very low rate of discount for damages of future climate change and a higher one for investment and development. Should Lord Stern sternly apply the high implicit Schellnhuber rate of time preference, all the conclusions of the said Stern report would fall by the wayside.
As an alternative, Herr Professor Schellnhuber should recommend that a supermajority of the German Parliament be composed of his Ombudsmen for the Unborn. One small problem is that those Ombudsmen will not be unborn, but born and grown in the uncaring present, so there should be some doubts about their clear perception of their constituency's interest.
Extracts from a jointly authored paper of his, on tipping points. No hard evidence, but a circulated computer survey asking for opinions and beliefs (yes beliefs) from 43 individuals of the climate community, funded by.... the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/13/5041.full
Selected parts of the text:
'A common criticism is that expert elicitations do not add to the body of scientific knowledge unless verified by data or theory. In the context of risk analysis and decision making, however, expert elicitations have proved to be a unique tool for systematically gathering and projecting scientific information in complex policy problems (12, 13). It is increasingly recognized that they can play a valuable role for informing climate policy decisions .....Participation in our study was voluntary, which may have introduced a self-selection bias toward experts with higher concerns about tipping points. The possibility of such a bias will have to be judged on the basis of the list of participating experts (Table S2). In addition, nonzero probabilities of triggering major changes in the climate system may have emerged simply because we confronted experts with those particular events. We believe that such an “availability bias” is mitigated by the use of imprecise probabilities....Fig. 1 reveals that the experts' ambiguity about the probability of triggering a tipping point (as measured by the distance between their lower and upper probability assignments) is large. One-third of all estimates (38% of estimates from core experts) cover at least half the range of the unit probability interval, and several of them express near ignorance. In addition, expert intervals scatter widely. Nonetheless, there is a considerable amount of information contained in the expert assessments...'
Thus, another peer reviewed climate research paper is born. But at least they should be credited with fully expressing just where his 'data' was derived!
It is staggering example of how baseless 'science' may become woven into policy.
The only thing missing is Sgt Schulz telling the interviewer "I know nuthing"
Or General Burkhaulder . . .
"Vould you like to hear the sound of sleigh bells Colonel Klink?"
"Coming at you on ze Russian Front !"
We just c a n n o t let it lie, can we? :)
@fred
Intended to be humorous, no offence intended and, I hope, none taken.
I sometimes need an adult with me before I post.......
Hogan's Hero's will never die :)
. . . . no offense taken
@Pharos.
Excellent find. That paper you referenced contains the word "belief" 19 times and the phrase "tipping point" 49 times.
My Bayesian BS detector automatically filed this one for me.
Bridge engineers don't make people aware of everthing that could cause their bridge to collapse. Bridge engineers build the bridge to withstand all sorts of events which could cause it to collapse. Then adds another 30% to 100% safety factor on top. He only needs to put those calculations into a document and store it somewhere safe.
I'll bet you would be hard pressed to find any document anywhere from a bridge engineer, trying to make people aware of how their bridge could collapse.
o/t - Interesting discussion about why the whole CAGW organism exists here:
"A Very Convenient Network?"
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=322#comments
Contains a thought-provoking diagram - thanks TonyN!
(Did a search but couldn't see this posted before - apologies if missed).
Is there any truth in the rumour that Schellnhuber's Potsdam Institute is located at former STASI training college in Potsdam, or that that in turn formerly housed or was adjacent to Gestapo/SS facilities? Probably not, but there is an umbilical cord uniting all three world views with their shared totalitarianism.
"Besides, in Greek mythology Cassandra was always right -- unfortunately."
- Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Climastrologist
.."As an expert"..
He acclaims himself as an expert..
Seems like he has a very high opinion of himself...
Perhaps he should have said... "As the Governments advisor it is my... etc"
cheerio Jim
Jonathan:
"Steve2, the idea was first discussed by G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy..."
Wonderful quote, Jonathan! Thank you.
Pharos -
The PNAS paper on expert elicitations which you cited, is one of several which I have consigned to the ninth circle of Hell. Oddly -- or perhaps not so oddly -- many of those in that circle come from PNAS.
My initial reaction was that, despite many caveats in the text, the authors make the epistemological error of promoting a multitude of opinions (even informed opinions) as equivalent to fact.
The worthiness of their conclusions is perhaps best illustrated from one of the tipping points they considered: the possibility of a “largely ice-free state” of the Greenland Ice Sheet before the year 2200. Despite the fact that two of the 15 respondents calculated that the GIS would take longer to melt, the other experts’ responses were duly tallied and combined to produce a seemingly convincing consensus that full GIS melt was a likely event within that time frame.
That PNAS paper convinced me that “expert elicitation” is merely a vehicle for promoting scary scenarios without the inconvenient requirement of evidence.
As joint author of " Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change", Schellnhuber is a leading CAGWist.
Thanks Jonathan for that GK Chesterton quote, I can see what Chesterton is saying there about tradition, a sort of "Wisdom of Crowds" of the past. However, in my dodgy analogy contrasting Schellnhubers idea of preserving ombudsman for a 10% of future generations, with a idea of also preserving 10% of politics reserved for mediums or table tappers for past generations, it still begs the question who are we to choose to represent the unborn (future) or long dead people (tradition)? Obviously for the representatives of the the long dead people (tradition) we can hire someone like a modern day Doris Stokes. For the future however, I am worried by this tendency that certain scientists want to create bodies that seem to circumvent normal democracy and representation. I may be doing Schellnhubers a disservice here, but when I wonder who he expects this ombudsman without an earthly constituent to report to, I am betting Schellnhubers assuming they will go straight to scientists and therefore scientists will have gained some unearned political power.
Almost apropos of nothing, I also liked this quote of Chestertons:
dearme, Tony Windsor:
No, Schwanz ( = tail ), Pimmel, Schwengel are rather nice words, wheras prick is offensive.
In the south they would use Seckel ( = bag ), or even Schafseckel ( = ... of a sheep). That is an insult, and can cost you money if you use it in a blog (Google "Seckel + Ursula Notter").
I should learn to write my own name
A high ranking German official demanding that democracy be curtailed in face of an imagined emergency and enemy. Now where have I heard that before?
Angela Merkel should be careful who she picks as a confidant.
Further to my previous post, H-J Schellnhuber reveals his total idiocy with his comments on engineers building bridges:
"As an expert, it's possible that I tend to point to dangers and risks more than to opportunities and possibilities -- similarly to an engineer who builds a bridge and has to make people aware of everything that could cause it to collapse. Warning against a possible accident is in fact intended to reduce the likelihood of an accident".
Strangely enough, here in Canberra on Saturday we had the total collapse of a bridge across the Barton Highway, the main road from here to Melbourne. Pace Hans-Joachim, the engineer was not to be seen on Saturday warning us locals not to use his bridge because it was about to collapse, instead he proudly authorised the cement pour that caused it to collapse.
It seems likely his firm was appointed by a member of our local government here as a good bloke who would contribute as required to election expenses.
In the non-Potsdam-STASI-Gestapo world of Schellenhuber, engineers do not stand on the roadside warning us not to use their bridges, as H-J claims, but design them so that they do not collapse before they are even opened to traffic.
Re Climate, I am preparing to embark on a series of class actions against the Potsdam-STASI and its soulmates at the NAS (USA), Royal Society, and AAS (Australian Academy of Sciences), for their determination to act like engineers knowing their bridges will collapse as soon as opened to traffic, for if they sincerely believed they were right on climate change, they would happily indemnify all of us for any failure of their climate change predictions to materialise as against the real and present costs of their totalitarian determination to have us reduce our CO2 emissions to below 40% of their level in 2000.
We'd do better giving 10% of the vote to our ancestors.
=================
Taking Schellnhuber's suggestion to its logical conclusion, since the unborn generations are so numerous, one would need at least an equal number of these ‘representatives of the future’, not just 10%. They could all sit in a separate assembly, with power of veto over bills passed by the directly elected representatives. Of course to ensure complete commitment to future generations, this should be a hereditary position, to give these representatives a sufficiently long-term view.
Funny that no country has ever thought of trying this system ... :-)
When will someone ask the following question:
"Prove the causal mechanism of Global Warming, predict an outcome based on your proof, then verify it by experiment".
Nobody could do this. I have been looking for this question and answer for years. It would be all that is required for the Warmers to prove their claims if they even believed them. This is also the fundamental principle that makes science science. Instead I have found statistical models and fraud. Not surprisingly the whole story is crumbling. Asking this question and holding someone to an answer would end the debate forever. I don't know why journalists, who are supposed to be the communication experts, get dragged into peripheral and political digressions and consistently fail to nail anyone down with this question. But I will note how none of the so-called top scientists in the world aren't offering it either. Just shoddy proxy records from a few trees or broken satellites strung together under the weight of countless human assumptions.
Just the fact that the word science is thrown around in these discussions makes me want to punch someone in the face. This is the furthest thing from science, and these are the furthest things from scientists. I hope Schellnhuber dies a painful death from AIDS.
I am very ashamed of making a comment following the previous one, but this goes for readers of a much more tolerant character.
There is a very interesting link to a paper, coauthored with Pielke Sr. in which Cassandra espouses very different views on the oracle:
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/comments-by-hans-schellnhuber/
Hmm. So it takes only 7 years for total dementia to develop.
Scary...