The book, The Plague of Models: How Computer Modeling Corrupted Environmental, Health, and Safety Regulations by Kenneth Green, is banned by Amazon. I don’t think Amazon bans many books. They don’t have time to read them all. The book is available at Barnes and Noble.

The Plague of Models is a wide-ranging attack on a broad spectrum of government regulation and policy, including alleged cancer-causing substances, air pollution, and doomsday predictions like global warming, acid rain, and the ozone hole. It is also an attack on the scientists who use computer models incorrectly to generate scientific results, better known as the computer slogan “Garbage In Garbage Out ' (GIGO).

Scientists want to generate important-sounding, even sensational results. They want to be famous and enjoy the benefits of higher social status. That desire leads to stretching or breaking the rules. For example, hunting through data for a supported hypothesis, or data dredging, is a temptation that breaks the statistics. There are many other temptations.

I think Green is a bit soft on the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The doomsday climate models used by the IPCC accept climate inputs for previous decades and output a simulated climate. The closer the past simulated climate is to the past measured climate, the better the model, according to their methodology. The models are then run with estimated future climate inputs in order to generate a projected future climate. The official projected future climate is obtained by averaging together results from a dozen or so climate models, models that strongly disagree with each other.

The danger is that models that have many adjustable parameters are primarily doing curve fitting to make the past climate projections agree with past measured climate. If the models are little more than very complicated curve-fitting engines, their predictive power would be nil. The averaging of results from diverse climate models has been justified on the grounds that it gives better agreement with past measured climate. If the models are curve-fitting engines, it is expected that averaging diverse models gives better results due to averaging of random and uncorrelated errors.

The various models don’t always use the same climate inputs, because important inputs, such as aerosols, are poorly quantified. Kevin Trenbreth, probably the most important scientist on the climate alarmist side of the argument and one-time head of modeling at the National Center for Atmospheric Research  (NCAR), said this about the models:

 “None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate.”

The models are modeling an imaginary world, not the Earth.

The organizations and people touting climate doomsday are highly political. They embrace climate doom because it is a useful tool in their quest to remake society while hiding their subversive intentions. It doesn’t matter if the predictions are junk science if they can be presented as solid science via propaganda.

A simple doomsday model that until recently had many believers was devised by Thomas Malthus in 1798. Malthusianism is based on the idea that population grows exponentially, like a bank account yielding compound interest, while food production grows much more slowly. Food production has grown at an astounding rate. For example, in 100 years, corn yields grew seven times and wheat three times. However fast the production of food grows, exponential population growth would eventually swamp it. But in the developed world negative population growth has become widespread, China having one of the worst problems. In response China is promoting the three-child family. It’s not working. An exponentially shrinking population creates the problem of an inverted population pyramid with too few young workers to support the larger retired cohort.

Once people began living in cities under modern conditions, they voluntarily started having fewer children, not because they were convinced by Zero Population Growth or educated by Planned Parenthood, but because children are a burden and inconvenience in modern cities. In some countries each new generation is 60 percent as large as the previous generation. The number of grandchildren will be 35 percent as large as the number of grandmothers and grandfathers.

The 1972 book Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome reported on MIT computer models that predicted a doomsday disaster by the year 2000 due to population growth, pollution, and running out of resources. The Club of Rome does not seem to be in the least embarrassed that the 1972 predictions failed miserably.

Today’s computers are hundreds of times more powerful than 1972 computers. Old-fashioned computers were perfectly adequate for making bad predictions.

Many substances have been banned because rats fed extremely high doses develop cancer. Fortunately, not many people feel sorry for rats as they might for puppies. Kenneth Green goes to great lengths to show that rats are very different from people. Underlying these experiments Is the linear, no-threshold hypothesis.  If rats get cancer from a dose 1000 times greater than any human would consume proportional to body weight, then it is assumed that the substance will cause cancer in humans because it is assumed there is no-dose threshold. There often are dose thresholds, but it is difficult to measure them because the effect of low doses, if any, is too small.

Second-hand smoke or environmental tobacco smoke is an example in which the government and others use poor science to promote the idea that it will give you cancer. Environmental tobacco smoke is highly diluted compared to what a smoker experiences but it is claimed to be highly dangerous. A quality-of-life case can be made against environmental tobacco smoke but it is dishonest to claim that science shows that it is extremely dangerous. Kenneth Green wisely does not bring up the tobacco smoke issue. A substantial part of the non-smoker population is probably happy that the government lies about the danger.

In the case of ionizing radiation -- x-rays and nuclear radiation -- the linear, no-threshold hypothesis is government policy, but there is extensive evidence that in small doses ionizing radiation is not only harmless but beneficial. Large doses will promote cancer or even kill. The beneficial effects of small doses were found in large elaborate studies, such as the nuclear shipyard study where workers in shipyards servicing nuclear warships were compared to workers in non-nuclear shipyards. An accidental experiment was performed in Taiwan where steel concrete reinforcing rods were accidently contaminated with highly radioactive cobalt 60. This was not discovered for years while the inhabitants of buildings constructed with the radioactive steel received radiation far above background levels. By the time the contamination was discovered, the cobalt had gone through several five-year half-lives. The international regulatory community showed little interest in investigating this experiment on humans that could never be performed deliberately for ethical reasons. The Taiwanese scientists that investigated found that the health of the persons exposed to the radiation was better than that of similar persons not exposed. This is not covered in Green’s book but is highly relevant.

In the author’s biography at the end of the book there is this:

Many of the highest profile environmental regulations Ken studied seemed to be grounded in shoddy science; were coercive and indifferent to individual rights; often involved cronyism and expansionist government; and, adding insult to injury, were often inefficient or entirely ineffective at remediating some actual environmental, health, or safety harm.

Kenneth Green’s book is a devastating attack on the regulatory state.

Norman Rogers is the author of the Amazon book Dumb Energy: A Critique of Wind and Solar Energy. He has a website climateviews.com.

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