What Employment Prediction Tells About Global Warming
Instanpundit points to the chart below plotting the predicted unemployment rates of the Obama administration including the actual rate of unemployment.
Whats remarkable is that literally after only three months their prediction about unemployment were off. Within six months they were wildly wrong. However, these predictions were in part used to justify the tremendous amount of spending to help the economic recovery.
Bearing in mind that this administration was unable to predict unemployment literally three month into the future, I ask you what kind of confidence do you have in the administration’s ability to predict climate trends literally 45 years into the future. Any reasonable person would conclude such prognostication are foolishly inane at best. And yet, the house supported by the president, several months ago passed a massive and expensive piece of legislation (cap and trade) to try and prevent so called prediction of our climate many many years from now.
Given that we can’t even predict unemployment numbers three months into the future, perhaps it would be wise to refrain from massive legislation to stop outcomes that have been ‘predicted’ to occur many many years into the future.
November 9th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
I had this a day before Instapundit.
http://newsgangster.blogspot.com/2009/11/hope-vs-reality-economic-stimulus.html
November 16th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
My main objection to this line of reasoning is that it is based on the assumption that a small number of data points (for example, three months of data collection) will have a more tight fit with the model than a large number of data points (for example, 45 years of data collection). In my opinion this is a shaky assumption - there’s a reason collecting more data increases your confidence.
For example, in my experience, weather forecasters are only slightly more accurate than the man on the street at telling you whether it will rain between 3 o’clock and 4 o’clock tomorrow (short-term prediction), but they are fairly good at telling you whether it will rain at all in the next week (long-term prediction).