Leading climate scientists have mocked and criticised Jordan Peterson’s comments during an interview on Joe Rogans podcast.
Peterson, who isn’t an expert on climate change, said that models used to predict the future state the climate would not be able to be relied upon in a new interview on Spotifys most-listened podcast.
Rogan was told by Peterson that the climate couldn’t be accurately modelled because it was so complex.
He stated that climate modeling also has a problem. The error rate increases as the models are extended over time. You can only predict a week, three weeks or a whole year ahead of time, but the more you project, the greater the error in your model.
It’s a big problem when you try to model over 100-years because the errors compound just as interest.
Peterson stated that if the climate is about everything, then your models don’t work because they can’t include everything.
However, climate scientists have called Petersons comments shockingly ignorant and said that he had fundamentally misunderstood Climate Modelling.
Dr Sarah Perkins Kirkpatrick is a climate scientist at University of New South Wales Canberra. She said that Peters description of climate models working was fundamentally incorrect. Although weather forecasts are less accurate the farther out they go, it was a different process than climate modeling.
He seems to believe that we can model the future climate in the same way as we model the weather. He seems intelligent, but it is completely false.
She said that he has no idea.
Scientists are reacting to Spotify’s decision to remove Neil Young’s music after the singer issued an ultimatum.
Young was furious at the misinformation that was being spread on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast regarding the Covid-19 pandemic. Rogans has previously featured claims made by a different guest on his show that hospitals are financially incentivised and encouraged to falsely diagnose deaths as being caused Covid-19-related. Also, that world leaders had hypnotized the public to support vaccines.
Rogan and Young can be used. Young wrote that they cannot have Rogan or Young in a letter to his managers.
Spotify claims that it has 381 million registered users and 172,000,000 subscribers. Rogan is the top-rated podcaster in the UK, USA, and Australia.
Dr Gavin Schmidt is a senior advisor at Nasa and a climate modeller. He tweeted: Guys, for love of all things holy, please have someone on who knows what a climate modeling is!!
Schmidt explained to the Guardian that he was reminded a quote by George Box, a British statistician.
Schmidt said that Peterson has been able to absorb the first half of George Box’s famous dictum, “All models are wrong”, but appears to not have learned the second.
Professor Steve Sherwood of the Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, stated that Peterson was making an ancient climate sceptic error of mixing weather and climate.
This problem would be obvious to anyone who has taken an introduction course in climate science or atmospheric science. Weather forecast errors can accumulate to the point that the forecast becomes useless after a few weeks.
Sherwood explained that climate models are not able to predict how climate will react to different factors such as higher levels CO2.
[Petersons]Argument is like saying that we can’t predict whether a pot full of water will boil on a flame. We decide beforehand what variables we want to use and can’t predict every bubble.
Sherwood said that scientists can have confidence in their projections by using the laws and thermodynamics.
Monash University climate modelling expert Prof Christian Jakob said Petersons comments were uninformed and that he had mixed up weather predictions with climate projections.
Although people have the right of their opinions, science and climate modelling are not about opinions. If you don’t know how something is done, it’s not right to make comments on it on a large platform.
Holy moly. This is impossible for me. Peterson’s first words in the Joe Rogan interview were complete self-parody. I can’t even dunk on it. pic.twitter.com/hIDYPi0KDc
— bad_stats (@thebadstats) January 25, 2022
Prof Michael Mann, an atmospheric scientist at Penn State University said that Rogans facilitation and Petersons comments were almost comical forms of nihilism.
Petersons claim that climate is too complex shows a complete lack of understanding of science and could be used as a basis to dismiss physics and biology and any other science where conceptual models are created, according to Mann.
He said that every great scientific discovery, including the one that allowed Peterson to record and broadcast their absurd conversation, was made through this process.
We have been projecting future temperature since the early 1970s, when the first climate models were developed. We can see how they have performed in the past. Our models did a great job. https://t.co/xxi1BgiDO0 pic.twitter.com/Ehan82kHFc
— Dr. Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) January 26, 2022
Professor John Abraham, a climate scientist from the University of St Thomas in Minnesota said that the episode was a word-salad of nonsense spoken only by people who don’t have any sense of climate.
It is absurd to say that climate model errors increase as compound interest. Jordan Peterson is a complete idiot when it comes to climate change and the tools climate scientists have to understand what’s happening to our planet.
It was as if someone with no expertise or knowledge made comments about something they don’t know much about.
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After raising concerns about pandemic misinformation during an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast’s Episode 210, 270 experts wrote Spotify earlier this month asking for a clear and public policy to moderate misinformation.
Mass-misinformation events on this scale can have extremely serious consequences. Experts wroteAccording to the podcast’s creator, it had an estimated 11 million listeners.