Sublime

Hansen is better known, however, for his 1988 congressional testimony as well as a related 1988 paper74 that he published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. This set of predictions did rely on a three-dimensional physical model of the atmosphere. Hansen told Congress that Washington could expect to experience more frequent “hot summers.” In hi

One of the more forthright early efforts to forecast temperature rise came in 1981, when Hansen and six other scientists published a paper in the esteemed journal Science.72 These predictions, which were based on relatively simple statistical estimates of the effects of CO2 and other atmospheric gases rather than a fully fledged simulation model, h

This property—group forecasts beat individual ones—has been found to be true in almost every field in which it has been studied. And yet while the notion that aggregate forecasts beat individual ones is an important empirical regularity, it is sometimes used as a cop-out when forecasts might be improved.

This contrasted25 with the more skeptical viewpoint of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who argued that since we could not be certain that the sun would rise again, a prediction that it would was inherently no more rational than one that it wouldn’t.26 The Bayesian viewpoint, instead, regards rationality as a probabilistic matter. In essence, B

The 1970s were the high point for “vast amounts of theory applied to extremely small amounts of data,” as Paul Krugman put it to me. We had begun to use computers to produce models of the world, but it took us some time to recognize how crude and assumption laden they were, and that the precision that computers were capable of was no substitute for

Baseball offers perhaps the world’s richest data set: pretty much everything that has happened on a major-league playing field in the past 140 years has been dutifully and accurately recorded, and hundreds of players play in the big leagues every year.

“Where you have to draw the line is to be very clear about where the uncertainties are, but to not have our statements be so laden in uncertainty that no one even listens to what we’re saying,” Mann told me. “It would be irresponsible for us as a community to not be speaking out. There are others who are happy to fill the void. And they’re going to