Time To End Bad Science Like This

I remind you, yet again, that all models only say what they are told to say. A bland truism. Unless you forget it. Let’s now look at two “climate change” models.

First is by some entity named First Street, which somehow makes a living frightening people about “climate change” risk. They say odd things like “When insurance premiums go up, property values go down”, which I take to mean the most luxurious houses should have the lowest insurance rates. But, given my financial ignorance, maybe I’m wrong.

Their model made the press, but we see no more than a summary of it. Gist is that they threaten a \$1.47 Trillion-with-a-T reduction in house value because “climate change”, unless—unless what? Unless they are consulted?

They say things like this:

Thus, climate change is disrupting established patterns of migration. Regional desirability is being reshaped by chronic changes in climate across the country: coastal areas are increasingly threatened by sea level rise, while inland regions face intensifying heat waves, droughts, and floods. 

Nowhere is safe! “Climate change” is going to get you. Yet they’re right about climate migration. Every winter large hordes of Canadians migrate to Florida – and join euchre tournaments.

First Street also claims, “the increased frequency and intensity of natural disasters has triggered unprecedented levels of property damage,” which is false. There has been no general increase in frequency or intensity. Now how could a firm that makes a living purporting to know about “climate change” “risk” miss that?

There has, however, been inflation in property values, and not a reduction. Maybe that’s a good explanation why insurance rates have gone up?

Sadly, I’m reporting on this a week or two late, so we have missed their 4 February webinar on what all this means, leaving us no way to “leverage” the information for investing.

Second model is more serious, and more common. Behold, the peer-reviewed paper “Estimating future heat-related and cold-related mortality under climate change, demographic and adaptation scenarios in 854 European cities” by Masselot and others in Nature Medicine.

They start cleverly by acknowledging the obvious: “Previous health impact assessments of temperature-related mortality in Europe indicated that the mortality burden attributable to cold is much larger than for heat.” Boy, howdy, is this true. Which is why if your concern is temperature-related death, you ought to cheer on some slight warming. Which is exactly what those Canadians do when fleeing south.

Yet that message grates against the narrative that any warming is bad, so our authors have to find a way around it. And do. With a model.

A model with scenarios.

Now a scenario is a statement about what will happen if some set of measures take whatever values you specify. For instance, I might specify a scenario in which aliens from outer space sail to earth to steal our carbon dioxide, their planet having used up their natural store of it making collectible seashells. This theft will plunge us into another ice age and increase “climate change” related deaths.

Too fanciful, you say? Well let’s look at their first scenario and see some real science: “a more equitable Europe committed to sustainability and low-consumption lifestyles resulting in substantial action toward both mitigation and adaptation”. This Equality fever dream was made into a regression, which was then plugged into this:

To obtain climate change-related deaths, we computed ANs [attributable numbers] as described above under two subscenarios. In the ‘full’ subscenario, health impact projections were computed directly considering calibrated temperature and demographic projections as described by equation (1). In a second ‘demographic change-only’ subscenario, we performed health impact projections on a second set of temperature projections $x^*_{ijt}$, which were recalibrated such that the temperature distribution remained constant across the whole period. 

And that was only the start of the horror list of equations. The whole is models upon models upon models. All put in service to erase the obvious truth that slightly warmer temperatures are better for all.

I’ve used the example so many times that you’re bored of hearing it, but these scientists posit increases of temperature in fractions of degrees. The people fleeing south in winter see increases in tens of degrees, to the benefit of their health. And the people remaining behind through the summers in Florida, Arizona, and whatnot are not dropping dead at any noticeable rates higher (age adjusted) than their northern cousins.

There has to come a point, and I suspect soon because funds are now being axed, that this kind of bandwagon LookAtMe model-manipulation science is no longer tolerated. But it will take accelerating those cuts. Let’s all push for it.

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