Michael Crichton’s last book: Micro

 

[I sent this from the iBooks app from my iPad]

From the first chapter, in a discussion about how children now are raised without an appreciation for how little science actually knows about the world:

Perhaps the single most important lesson to be learned by direct experience is that the natural world, with all its elements and interconnections, represents a complex system and therefore we cannot understand it and we cannot predict its behavior. It is delusional to behave as if we can, as it would be delusional to behave as if we could predict the stock market, another complex system. If someone claims to predict what a stock will do in the coming days, we know that person is either a crook or a charlatan. If an environmentalist makes similar claims about the environment, or an ecosystem, we have not yet learned to see him as a false prophet or a fool.

EXCERPT FROM

Crichton, Michael. "Micro." HarperCollins, 2011-12-01. iBooks.

Test Driving the Miles Electric Car

Mike Cero, always looking for cost-effective ways to help the environment,  invited me to help test drive an electric car now available for sale from MC Electric Vehicles, a local dealership that specializes in green vehicles.

We tried the ZX40S, a 4-seater hatchback from Miles Electric Vehicles, and the first street-legal Chinese-made auto sold in America.  Good Clean Tech rated them the "Electric Car Company of 2007", and they're getting some buzz among die-hards who want no-pollution cars.  This one is solidly-built, though very basic:  no power steering or air conditioning, and since it won't go faster than 35mph you can't use it on the freeway.  But it might be perfect as a fleet vehicle for organizations looking for short-range shuttle cars, or for people who do all short trips in a small community like Mercer Island.

In terms of performance and handling, the part I love about electrics is their quiet ride.  My Prius goes into silent all-electric mode too, but you hear the engine again when you accelerate.  Not so with the ZX40S: it's quiet all the time.  In fact, it's so quiet we joked that you might need to take extra measures to ensure bicyclists can hear you on the road--it really runs silently.

Of course the big advantage of an electric car is the complete lack of a gas tank.  It says it charges in about 8 hours (i.e. overnight), giving you a range of about 50 miles.  We didn't test it that far, but I think you'd want to be careful counting on it past 30 miles or so.  The range seems to depend on how hilly the area is and how much load you have in the car (i.e. total passenger and cargo weight).  Of course, if you run low on a charge it's a simple matter of plugging it into the closest electric outlet.  (But be careful: it has to be a 20 amp outlet--not the more typical 15A sockets you'd normally find in your house).

So how did it do?  I think in a flat area this car would be just fine, but there's not a lot of oomph for climbing.  We found it slow going up some of the more challenging Mercer Island areas (like Gallagher Hill), especially as the charge runs down.  And as I noted, it's only legal for road speeds under 35mph, so you're limited to neighborhood driving.

The price, about $23K including taxes and everything, is about what you'd pay for a basic Prius--which has a lot more power and flexibility.  Still, if you live in a flat area, don't need high speeds, and you want zero-pollution without the hassle or expense of going to a gas station, this car will do what it says.  Meanwhile I think I'll wait for MC Electric to start carrying the Miles XS500, the new Camry-sized 80MPH luxury model scheduled to go on sale later this year.

Mass transit vs. green alternatives

Mass transit is always good, right? It's way more efficient than all those cars clogging up the roads. I loved my years in Japan, where trains come and go everywhere with high efficiency and frequency. I didn't need a car, and it was great. You'll know what I mean if you've ever spent time in New York City or Washington D.C. Plus, the imminent threat of global warming compels us to build for a future of mass transit, right?

But while reading the Economist's excellent survey on The Future of Energy last week, a new thought occurred to me that I haven't seen discussed. What happens when, thanks to all this entrepreneurial energy going into solving our energy problems, we get zero-emissions cars? Then, what's the green argument for building zillion-dollar train and bus infrastructure? Some of these projects take decades to complete--by which time it's hard to imagine gas-hogging cars will still be around. Road congestion, parking scarcity, etc. -- all of these can be made much easier with information technology that again it's hard to imagine won't be in full swing by the time that gigantic train project is complete.

I'm just one guy, so you shouldn't make policy based solely on what works for me, but at the same time you risk doing terribly damaging and irrational things if you try to "guess" about what works best for society as a whole. If you aren't positive something's a good public policy idea, you should be extremely cautious recommending it, and public transportation policy is another example.

There is just no way you will ever make mass transit efficient enough for those of us in the suburbs to give up our cars. I'll carpool or vanpool to work if it's convenient, sure, but a bus? Or a train? No way, especially if I have one of those super-efficient low-cost, carbon-neutral cars of the future.

I bet virtually everyone supporting big mass transit projects agrees with me when they say we want mass transit for other people. I'm too busy/important/lazy to take the train, but you on the other hand shouldn't be able to enjoy my lifestyle. I want you to deal with hauling groceries, making multiple drop-offs for young kids, changing your mind to pick up last-minute takeout -- all the reasons it's rational for me to take a car instead of the bus or train. If you get off the road, it will make my life easier: no traffic congestion, no parking problems.

But what happens when you decide you want to move into your own single-family dwelling in the suburbs? Hmmm, maybe I can think of something that will prevent you from ever being able to afford that. Like, maybe if I raise your taxes enough to pay for some expensive mass transit project?

Incidentally, before you say it's obvious what should be done, take a look at Jimmy Carter's energy crisis speech of 1979.  What happened to the 20% of energy we were supposed to get from solar by 2000?  Or the declaration that "this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977"?  Laudable goals, but they look about as silly in hindsight as I'm sure most of today's well-meaning proposals will seem in 30 years.

One good reason to keep your bottled water

Today's Seattle Times describes bottled water and mentions that many of the the nation's mayors are suggesting we use tap water instead.

But missing from the discussion is the one difference between bottled and tap water that might matter: tap water contains fluoride (at least here in Seattle and Mercer Island).  Adults with healthy teeth don't need fluoride, and young kids can get it plenty of other ways.  Scientific American and others point out that many of us get too much, mostly thanks to tap water.

I just checked with Aquafina (and I'm sure the other mainstream waters are similar): they don't contain fluoride.

So my advice to anyone in government who wants to force us to give up bottled water:  turn off the fluoride in the tap water first.

From Kurtwood cow to me

Nothing beats the taste and nutritional value of raw milk:  fresh, not cooked unpasteurized, from cows grazing on real pasture -- the kind I drank as a kid, the kind your ancestors drank for thousands of years.  While visiting Vashon Island this weekend, we finally had the chance to stop at Kurtwood Farms, to see real cows and drink real milk.

Kurt Timmermeister was kind enough to show us the pasture, let us touch the cows, and of course buy some of the fresh, clean milk, which he hand-pours into bottles each day -- about 15 gallons worth, from four cows -- a herd he has been raising for the past few years on a small farm in the middle of the island, right there with pigs, sheep, and a field of corn.

He is obsessed with quality and cleanliness. He follows all the regulations, of course, but talking with him I got the sense that he is a meticulous guy anyway, doing this for fun and for the thrill of making a high-quality product.

If you think good food only comes from Whole Foods or gourmet restaurants, there's nothing like a visit to a farm to help you understand what your ancestors knew, that real food comes from sun, water, air, and lots of labor.  I am extremely grateful for the wonderful variety and low costs possible by specialization and industrial scale agriculture and food processing -- that's why I'm not a locavore -- but I think everyone should spend the extra money and indulge now and then in the really good stuff.

Yummy!

Grandma and Me

I spent last week with my 92-year-old grandmother.  A lifelong dairy farmer, she grew up in a cabin with a dirt floor, deep in the woods of rural Wisconsin, so it's not surprising that she's extremely tough.  Extremely opinionated too, as I learned 15 years ago when she visited me in Japan and heard her talking about WWII and her work in a bandage factory. On everything from politics to the economy to international relations and the environment, she has the fierce confidence of a woman who knows you need to chop wood to survive a sub-zero Wisconsin winter -- and thinks that what many of you talk about is a bunch of hooey.

She's cut back her coffee drinking in the last few years.  I remember when she used to drink a pot before bedtime to "help her sleep".  And what does she think about organic food?  "Hah!," she says. "That's crazy."  She remembers being glad that they could finally afford pesticides, and she would never go back.  "You ever seen how many bugs you get?"

What about raw milk?  She thinks pasteurization is fine for the city folk, but as someone who drank fresh milk straight from the bulk tank her whole life, she's never heard of anyone getting sick.   When she was a girl, the woods were so thick that the bigger worry was finding pasture land for the cows.  Be thankful for what you have.

Real fixes to global warming

This month's Wired magazine (June 2008, not yet available on-line) is an absolute must-read for anyone seriously concerned about global warming and what can really be done about it.  The headline summarizes the thinking nicely: keep your SUV, forget organics, go nuclear, screw the spotted owl.  Like much of Wired, the title is meant to be provocative, but there is a huge grain of truth that deserves careful thought: all "fixes" have costs, and you better really know what you're doing before you make major changes in the name of "the environment".

Meanwhile, I'm following the advice posted yesterday at Crosscut's article "Sparing no expense to reduce that carbon footprint".  Here's my favorite tip:

I often hear the excuse, "With my schedule, I can't be expected to carpool." I say nonsense. Driving produces more than half your carbon footprint. I always ride with at least two people in the car, except on Sundays, when traffic is light and my driver has his day off.

Hey, every little bit counts.

Leap for Green

it was hard to find a parking place between all those SUVs, minivans, and BMWs parked at the Mercer Island Community Center this morning for the Leap for Green event.

I was surprised at the number of exhibits inside, including Island Books and Full Circle Farms.   Lots of kids everywhere.

Definitely worth a visit on a snowy April day.

Mike Cero's Carbon Challenge

Mercer Island City Councilman Mike Cero has always been a strong supporter of the environment, especially where it really counts at the local level.  On every issue, from HOV lanes to preserving parks to reducing airport noise, he is on the side of preserving quality of life.

He's also the the first local official I've seen who is brave enough to publicly talk about his own family's carbon footprint (in Nancy Hilliard's column in this week's Mercer Island Reporter):

From www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator.html,  I calculated [my family of five] at 120,692 pounds, which doesn’t seem too bad given that the average U.S. household of two is 41,500 pounds. According to www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction/carboncalculator, we create 14.3 tons, double the average family of about 7.5 tons. At www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator, I found my family of five at 78 tons...

Taking Mike's challenge for my own family, I was disappointed to see that my household footprint is higher than his:

I'm not sure why Mike beats me, but I suspect that it might be due to my frequent business trips.  I'm going to start doing more to cut down on travel.

In honor of this Saturday's Leap for Green event at Mercer Island Community Center, I think it would be great to see the rest of our public officials follow Mike's lead and publish their own carbon footprints.

I'm so much better than you

After my eco-tour of Costa Rica, and in honor of our globally warmed weather this weekend, I loaded up my Prius with garbage and dumped it at the Mercer Island Spring Recycling event on Saturday afternoon.  Besides a stash of household batteries I've been keeping for the past year, I finally got rid of an old computer monitor that's just been wasting space (only $10 dump fee).  I arrived at about 1:30pm, expecting to have to wait in a long line like last year, but there was no wait at all. 

 

I suppose I should include a sanctimonious comment about how wonderful and caring I am for doing this, or as Alisa Gravitz, organizer of this weekend's Seattle Green Festival puts it:

When you make a commitment to recycle, you're reducing waste, but you're also taking a stand that everyone should be able to live in a safe, healthy community, and to stop putting dumps in low-income communities.

Unfortunately my reasons were more selfish than self-righteous: I recycled because, well, I needed to get rid of that monitor and the regular garbage people won't take it. Same with the batteries, which I prefer for their high-energy content, in spite of the nasty chemicals inside.  As for putting dumps in low-income communities, I think Alisa's got it backwards: dumps are located near affordable housing because well, nobody wants to live there.

Now, time to get ready for next weekend's Leap for Green, paid for with my tax dollars, but before I go I'm going to re-read this report on the "State of Green Business"

Consumers’ skepticism was given credence in a report on “the six sins of greenwashing,” which found that the overwhelming majority of environmental marketing claims in North America are inaccurate, inappropriate, or unsubstantiated. After examining 1,018 consumer products bearing 1,753 environmental claims, researchers concluded that all but one made claims that are either “demonstrably false or that risk misleading intended audiences.”

By the way, here's a calculator to show how much energy you're saving my reading my blog:

How CAFE standards hurt the environment

I never understood the argument for CAFÉ (Corporate Average Fuel Economy), the law that forces auto manufacturers to increase the miles per gallon fuel efficiency of their cars. How could it possibly be a good thing to force -- by a top-down Soviet-style mandate -- which cars can and cannot be produced?  People make a zillion tradeoffs when deciding which car to buy -- safety, size, convenience, prestige, economy -- so why not let the manufacturers make the same set of tradeoffs?  Interfering in that process is a sure way to invite unintended consequences.

Don't get me wrong: I obviously think that saving gas is a good thing (heck, I drive a Prius!) But if we think gasoline consumption is too high, there are far better ways to discourage consumption, such as raising the tax on gas, or for that matter, the tax on gas guzzling vehicles.  Or, as the Seattle Times writes today, put tolls on our roads and bridges.

But here's the best reason of all for dumping the CAFÉ: it hurts the environment.  A study by Andrew Kleit, from Pennsylvania State University shows why:

Because the pollution from a car is a direct function of the number of miles it is driven, and people in more fuel-efficient vehicles drive more, the net result from an increase in cafe standards is an increase in automobile pollutants.

If you think about it, this is just common sense.   All other things being equal, you will drive more if your car costs less to drive.  I find this happening all the time myself: because my car gets 44+mpg, I don't think twice about taking trips that I might avoid if I were worried about gas prices.

How much worse will the air get under the new CAFE laws proposed by Obama and others?

	% increase because of CAFE
VOC Emissions	2.30%
NOx Emissions	4.97%

These are increased pollutants that Kleit computes will result from the extra driving that is an inevitable consequence of raising CAFE standards to 35mpg or more.  The math behind this isn't terribly complicated: just ask how much more people will drive thanks to better fuel efficiency and multiply by the additional pollutants expelled per mile.

Now of course you can immediately suggest that we double-down on the regulations and force both higher CAFE numbers and lower emissions. But what will be the unintended consequences of that? 

Challenging Global Warming Skeptics

"Facts are stubborn things", Ronald Reagan reminded knee-jerk ideologues with advice that applies to many of the people gathered at the Mercer Island Library for last night's Conservative Enthusiasts meeting on Global Warming. No matter how much you may wish it were different, if you're wrong about the evidence, your position is ultimately doomed.

Mark Sussman (MIT PhD and organizer of the group) understands the importance of real debate, so he invited as a special guest Dr. Richard Gammon, climatologist from the University of Washington, and Nobel Prize-winning member of the IPCC. After a showing of the movie (I saw last year) The Great Global Warming Swindle, they invited Prof. Gammon to give a rebuttal -- and take questions from the skeptics.

Prof. Gammon deserves another Nobel Prize for agreeing to present in front of such a hostile audience. If you think man-made global warming is a crisis and you want to affect opinions, you need to persuade the skeptics, not dismiss them as idiots the way Al Gore and others do by insisting "the debate is over". (If you think there's nothing to debate, by the way, I dare you to listen to the NPR-sponsored Global Warming debate ).  To Gammon's great credit, at least he was willing to come visit the other side.

The problem for most of the conservatives last night, I think, is that they approach the scientists' political motivations so skeptically that they refuse to listen, whether to facts or anything else. Unfortunately, Professor Gammon's talk ultimately failed because, like many from the Global Warming movement, he mixes science (where he is an expert) with policy (where he is not) -- and of course the audience saw right through it, and missed his overall point.

Here's the kind of presentation I'd like to see Prof. Gammon and others give next time:

1. Eliminate all talk about politics.  Assume nobody's a liberal, nobody's a conservative. Just talk provable science.
2. Be very humble when discussing projections about the future.  What may or may not happen in 50 or 100 years is so speculative and prone to error that it distracts from the real message--experimentally verifiable facts about what has happened in the past and what is happening right now.
3. Stop the tape.  While watching the video, push the pause button and refute the assertions one-by-one.  One reason the Swindle video is so powerful is that it does have some truth to it; acknowledge those facts and the uncertainties so you have credibility when refuting the errors.
4. Ask for advice. Conservatives don't want the world to end either.  If humans are causing the world to warm out of control, ask the audience how they would fix it.  Unfortunately, conservatives think the IPCC's proposal is "vote for Al Gore" -- which clearly has nothing to do with science. 

The Global Warming deniers are making a huge bet that facts are on their side.  But facts don't care about ideology. I think a committed focus on facts--not policy opinions--would change more minds.

Healthy ways to school

There's a wonderful debate going on about school transportation at ourmi.wikispaces.com, a community web site organized by new city council member Bruce Bassett.  Bruce and school board member John DeVleming discuss how and whether to promote getting kids to school via means other than cars, a debate that has additional new data to help understand the current situation.   A classroom survey at Lakeridge Elementary School last month indicated that on most mornings, here's how Mercer Island kids get to school:

Walked	16%
Biked	2%
Rode the bus	39%
Rode in a car	43%

Note that these numbers are subject to some interpretation, since we don't know how many of the car riders were actually car pools of several kids riding together.  And the kids who walk or biked are almost all from homes located adjacent to the school. 

I think John DeVleming wins this one, hands down.  How do "we" as a society (whatever that means), know that it's "better" for more kids to walk or bike to school?  Bruce says it's better because:

1. Childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions due in part to increasingly inactive lifestyles.
2. An estimated 25% of morning traffic is parents driving their children to school.
3. More cars on the street make neighborhoods seem less safe, discouraging walking and biking.
4. Overcrowded school drop-off and pick-up areas bring pollution and traffic danger to the doorsteps of our schools.

The first argument doesn't apply to my family: my kids are not obese and they're not inactive.  I'm not an expert on other families or other communities (maybe Bruce is?) so other than some speculation and/or personal opinions, I don't know how to tell whether encouraging walking will help or hurt "society".

The second and third arguments don't apply to my family either, since I drive the kids to school on my way to work, so no gas or traffic would be saved by them taking the bus.

The fourth argument is one where smart school policies can really have a positive impact--and already do.  My elementary school has strict rules, enforced by volunteers each morning, to ensure exactly how cars may approach the school.  And of course general speed limits (strictly enforced by a visible police presence) keep the area around schools much safer.

Finally, let's imagine Bruce could get his dream situation enacted and a tree-lined footpath were created in my back yard, with happy, singing children dancing together on their way to school and back each day.  My kids probably still would end up with me.  Why?  Because we're in a hurry to get them to school and back again so they can go to their karate lessons, soccer games, and a host of other active lifestyle choices.  I walked to school when I was a kid (and my grandparents walked to work) because we were all much poorer, with no other options.  Thankfully, the world has progressed a long way since then.

Organic vs. Conventional food on Mercer Island

Another reason to support a farmer's market: a new study of 19 kids from Mercer Island Elementary schools shows significant levels of pesticide residues in kids who eat conventionally-grown versus organic food.  The study, conducted over a one-year period in 2003-2004 showed that the pesticide residue disappears from these kids within a day or two of switching to organic food.

Here's the abstract (study by Chensheng Lu, Dana B. Barr, Melanie A. Pearson, and Lance A. Waller)

RESULTS: By substituting organic fresh fruits and vegetables for corresponding
conventional food items, the median urinary metabolite concentrations were reduced to
non-detected or close to non-detected levels for malathion and chlorpyrifos at the end of
5-day organic diet intervention period in both summer and fall seasons. We also
observed a seasonal effect on the OP urinary metabolite concentrations, and this
seasonality is correspondent to the consumption of fresh produce throughout the year.
CONCLUSIONS: The findings from this study demonstrate that dietary intake of OP
pesticides represents the major source of exposure in young children.

One interesting finding: pesticide levels are higher in the winter, even though the kids were eating the same amount of fruits and vegetables.  One possible explanation is that they're eating non-local food.  It's hard to get organic fruits/vegetables out of season, so kids switch to non-local (conventional) stuff.  I think one lesson is that parents should try to get their kids to eat seasonally-grown food, rather than the same ole grapes/carrots/apples all year round.

I wish our public schools would serve organic too.

[read more in the Seattle PI]

[book] The World Without Us

Although I'm fascinated by the subject of the book -- how the world would fare if humans suddenly disappeared --I was too lazy at first to read the entire thing, since it had already been summarized (I thought) in an excellent Scientific American article last July. I find that many authors tend to make books that are unnecessarily repetitive so it's more time-efficient to simply read the summary. Happily that's not the case with this book, which I received as a present and now finally finished reading this week. I learned a lot, about everything from Bialowieza Puszcza, the old-growth forest on the border between Poland and Belarus, to Varosha Cyprus, a city in a warzone that was abandoned suddenly in the 1970s and hasn't been revisited since. Oh, and the Rothamsted research archive of the UK, keeping soil samples since the 1800s, plus the Panama canal, the "Petro Patch" near Houston where zillions of deadly chemicals are produced. All very interesting, though I kept thinking of other areas he didn't cover. For example, he doesn't mention how the lack of firefighters means that huge fires would almost certainly consume cities well before the other effects of decay set in. Also, what about the complete extinction of some interesting human-made species of plants, like yellow 2 maize, which can't reproduce on its own?

The biggest eye-opener for me was the ubiquity and resilience of plastics of all kinds, a substance never before seen on earth and which are essentially indestructible. Properly disposed of, plastic is a huge economic benefit over any alternative, but the disposal caveat is bigger than I thought. I wonder what would happen if we changed the price of plastic to include disposal costs -- would it still be such a net positive?

Anyway, I'm an optimist who believes that the world is getting much better, in spite of the human-caused environmental problems which I think are significant but solvable and temporary. Books like this (and I'll add Jared Diamond's Collapsewhich I also enjoyed and recommend) forget one critical detail when they discuss the environment: a world without humans is also a world without the most precious substance in the entire universe--the human brain. Properly configured, there are no limits to the ingenuity possible and fantastic things that can be done when you have cooperative, healthy, well-organized people around -- and the more the better, I say. Instead of fantasizing about a world that loses the most precious substance of all, we should be figuring out ways to make even more of us.

The Inevitable Thaw in Global Warming

As I've said before, it is an indisputable scientific fact that the world is getting warmer, that the trend is likely to continue, and that humans are partly if not mostly responsible. The only real question is what, if anything, should be done about it.

The new Harvard Business Review has a whole section on it, featuring my b-school hero Michael Porter, and futurist Peter Schwartz who I respect greatly, but -- am I crazy? --I can't find a single recommendation that wouldn't be worth doing even if the world were not warming. Reduce transportation costs? Manage water resources wisely? A smart firm should do those things, period.

Sorry, there are a few exceptions. Michael Porter suggests that in some industries, new government regulations promoting carbon trading could make it more profitable for, say, a forestry company to plant rather than harvest trees. But that's a fake example that applies to any government policy. Farmers already plant unwanted crops when the government artificially subsidizes them.

Now I see that in our local Mercer Island City Council election of all places, we have candidate Patti Darling making this her number one campaign issue. How ridiculous is that? Reduce our carbon footprint, she says!? What on earth does that have to do with zoning, traffic, taxes--the issues that matter to me? Name one thing you would do on Mercer Island to reduce carbon emissions that wouldn't be smart even if there were no global warming? I dare you: think of a specific proposal that can't be justified for better, more practical and short-term reasons.

By the way, I'm ignoring the important fact that anything we do is so trivial that it will be completely irrelevant to the global climate. Sure, we can "show leadership" or whatever, but our sister city in China will be happy to out-pollute our leadership if it offers a way out of poverty.

Even if the entire world were to unite on this issue, most people agree that significant climate change is inevitable no matter what we do. But here's my point: we're not interested in an issue whose significant effects take decades, where mitigation steps are important for good reasons that have nothing to do with climate, and especially when it's clear to us that politicians and businesses are using this as crude attempt to sound like they care.

So I have a prediction: the 2008 election season will be the high point for "Global Warming" as a significant campaign issue. By 2012, and certainly within a decade or two, public attention will return to other, more meaningful problems. Sure, sea levels might rise and polar bears might die, but 2050 is a long, long time from now and we'll have long since given up on politicians who can't describe their platform more pragmatically.

Bonus question: how come nobody runs a City Council campaign on solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, or better relations with China, or reducing third world poverty? Any of those issues would have immediate relevance to many of us (and our relatives) today, could drive practical local initiatives (like sister city programs), and would have sustainable long-term benefits to children.

Forecasting Global Warming

 Scott Armstrong is a professor of marketing at Wharton who I remember as the geeky Decision Sciences instructor. He's an expert on forecasting, an important business discipline for market research of course, but also relevant for evaluating any long-term predictions of the future. His team runs a web site on forecasting principles, and publishes a book which is the standard textbook on the systematic study of decision-making about the future. His team has studied more than 82,000 forecasts to see which techniques work and which don't and one of their conclusions is that, without rigorous attention to some key details, "expert" long-range forecasts are almost always wrong.

This week he published a draft of a new report where he analyzes the IPCC's report on climate change (you know, the big UN-sponsored one that got all the attention earlier this year). Using his forecasting principles he concludes that the IPCC methodology is riddled with classic errors that essentially render it useless. Here are some biggies:

1. Forecasts made by experts who collaborate on their projections are weakly related to accuracy. The IPCC would have had better results if the various contributors reached their conclusions independently.
2. Even given modest uncertainty in models, the degree of long-range variability among predictions is so huge that you're unlikely to get valuable policy recommendations.
3. Models that "fit" to historical data, like much of the complex math behind the IPCC models, rarely produce accurate results without rigorous attention to details. All it takes it one or two unexpected events (volcanoes? El Nino?) and the entire projection goes out the window. He offers ways to control for this, but notes that IPCC didn't do that and probably would have had different results if they had.

Ever notice how discussions of global warming rarely (if ever) offer serious policy suggestions to fix the problem? Most recommendations I've seen on how to "save the planet" are worth doing for other short-term and very practical reasons: lowering your carbon footprint will lower your electric bill, cutting America's "addiction to oil" lessens our dependence on Middle East suppliers, a Prius is a fun high-tech car anyway, etc.  Nothing about that advice changes, regardless of the accuracy of these long-term (and probably inaccurate) projections. 

But don't be fooled when you see a company or politician use Global Warming as marketing spin to make it look like they have your long-term interests at heart.  If Scott Armstrong is right, the long-range forecasts are meaningless and may in fact be serving the short-term interests of people who just want you to buy their stuff or vote them into office.