09.24.2019
Why Climate Models Can't Guide Energy Policy: There are too many free parameters for the alarmist cooks to bake in!
In a recent article in the Washington Examiner, CO2 Coalition executive director Caleb Stewart Rossiter explained that there are thousands of approximations that climate modelers can use to influence model outcomes. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/a-democratic-professor-explains-what-his-party-gets-wrong-about-climate
Dr. Rossiter wrote: The father of these models was Cold War military theorist John von Neumann, who wanted to see if we could cause drought in the Soviet Union. He failed, thank goodness. Von Neumann joked, “with four parameters I can draw an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”
Well, thanks to some digging in his files by CO2 Coalition board member Will Happer, an atmospheric physicist at Princeton, here is a paper by Jürgen Mayer of the Max Planck Institute, et al., that finally gives us Von Neumann’s elephant using only four free parameters! And yes, makes it wiggle its truck with the fifth!
Drawing an elephant with four complex parameters By Jürgen Mayer, Khaled Khairy and Jonathan Howard American Journal of Physics 78 (6), June 2010