Andy @Revkin Points To The End of The Line For The IPCC And Its Lot
Thanks Andy!
Beginning in the 1980s, [University of Pennsylvania Professor Philip] Tetlock examined 27,451 forecasts by 284 academics, pundits and other prognosticators. The study was complex, but the conclusion can be summarized simply: the experts bombed. Not only were they worse than statistical models, they could barely eke out a tie with the proverbial dart-throwing chimps. [...] The least accurate forecasters, [Tetlock] found, were hedgehogs: “thinkers who ‘know one big thing,’ aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains” and “display bristly impatience with those who ‘do not get it,’ ” he wrote. Better experts “look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things,” “are skeptical of grand schemes” and are “diffident about their own forecasting prowess.”
So there we have it…experts of the “big thing” called “climate change”, aggressive (to the point of hiding declines, preventing publication of competing ideas, inserting unsubstantiated critiques in the IPCC report, etc etc) and definitely “impatient” with us little humans wondering aloud about their certitudes (any post at RC, Connolley, Deltoid, Romm, etc etc keeps confirming this point).
Note how none of the above can be defined as “gross negligence” or “conspiracy”, and yet despite all the whitewashing by the Climategate inquiries, there is a scientific consensus, and the best of our scientific knowledge demonstrates, that all that bunch, and pretty much all the bigwigs around the IPCC, they ARE “least accurate forecasters”. QED. (Maurizio Morabito, OmniClimate)
Dan Gardner’s latest book, Future Babble, was just released in the U.S.
It’s a whole book about the self-described experts who predict the future and who are almost always wrong – and about the irrationalities and biases that allow these “experts” to maintain their self-confidence and influence despite their repeated mistakes.
The author divides the experts to “hedgehogs” and “foxes”: the former always feel absolutely certain and they love to present their predictions in an unambiguous way; the latter partially realize the complexity of the questions but their predictions are found boring by the public. Consequently, the hedgehogs are always wrong while the foxes are just almost always wrong but the hedgehogs, because of their higher attractiveness, have a greater impact on the mankind. 
The book offers quite some selection of particular nonsensical predictions about the future that were proved wrong – as well as particular people who have always been wrong, with a repeatability that reaches comic proportions, but people haven’t yet managed to deduce the consequences. Gardner also tries to explain why the people keep on believing experts even though they must know that the predictions will be wrong. (The Reference Frame)
