Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
“The internet will have no more economic impact than the fax machine,” said Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. U.S. intelligence insisted the Afghan government would hold for months after the American withdrawal. It fell in eleven days. Military analysts around the world predicted Kyiv would fall within seventy-two hours in February 2022. It never did. The media lined up to predict that “Harry Potter” would flop because kids no longer read. Harry Potter sold half a billion copies.
“The internet will have no more economic impact than the fax machine,” said Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. U.S. intelligence insisted the Afghan government would hold for months after the American withdrawal. It fell in eleven days. Military analysts around the world predicted Kyiv would fall within seventy-two hours in February 2022. It never did. The media lined up to predict that “Harry Potter” would flop because kids no longer read. Harry Potter sold half a billion copies.
These were not fringe voices. These were the crowned heads of their domains, credentialed, lauded, confident experts. Their expertise was real, but their predictions were wrong.
Why are experts so often and so publicly wrong?
The Fox and the Hedgehog Problem
The answer comes from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, whose wisdom still matters today: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
Hedgehogs are deep specialists. They master one domain, seeing the world through a narrow lens. Their training encourages a single track that says double down, go deep, defend your turf.
• Foxes are integrators, generalists who pull ideas from different fields and adapt as reality demands. Foxes do not just tolerate ambiguity; they thrive in it.
Science Measures the Problem with Hedgehogs
Psychologist Philip Tetlock spent twenty years tracking expert predictions about world events. In his two-decade study, Tetlock catalogued more than twenty-eight thousand expert predictions and found that experts were slightly less accurate than a random coin toss.
The questions he posed were simple ones with yes or no answers. For example, would the Soviet Union collapse in five years? Would a major war break out? Again and again, the hedgehogs, the deep experts, failed dramatically. The generalists, however, did substantially better than chance. Their secret was breadth of perspective and adaptability, the classic traits of foxes.
Experts failed because of tunnel vision. Like photographers using a telephoto lens, hedgehogs saw only a narrow slice of reality. Foxes, with a wide-angle view, caught the crucial details on the periphery, the details specialists ignored.
Why This Pattern Persists and Why It Is Dangerous
The deeper someone goes into a field, the more their framework, their one big thing, becomes their only lens. There’s the ever-present danger that new information will be sifted to fit what they already believe. In both science and academia, the native habitat of experts, there is the danger that promotions or tenure or funding will go to the practitioners who agree with an existing consensus.
Some say, only half jokingly, that science advances one funeral at a time. They say this because once someone holds a particular view, that view can become part of their identity, and they will wall off anything that contradicts it. When entire disciplines fall victim to this kind of thinking, you get the worst effects of hedgehog thinking. You get a whole field in which brilliant people are confidently yet spectacularly wrong.
Journalists: Foxes in a Hedgehog World
So where do we find foxes? One place is journalists. The best journalists are forced to be foxes. Every day, they deal with conflicting accounts, unexpected outcomes, and situations where things they were sure of turn out not to be so.
Journalists remind the public, often at great personal risk, that truth is messy and theory must bow to evidence. Their gift is not perfection but rather curiosity, adaptability, and the humility to revise when the facts change. Journalists add the complexity that specialists often remove. In a world flooded with confident error, the fox mind is an antidote.
Experts are often right, but they are also often wrong. We need credentialed authorities because their deep knowledge helps us make sense of complexity. But when it comes to prediction, seek out foxes, that is, the generalists and synthesizers, because their broad perspective and adaptability make them better at spotting large patterns and recognizing new realities. In the end, the wisest guide is not the hedgehog who knows one big thing but the fox who pays attention to everything.
This article was originally published by RealClearScience and made available via RealClearWire.
The vast majority of the tens of thousands of people attending COP30 are there to sell and buy stuff, including oil, natural gas, and even coal. Climate policy has little to do with it. This is by far the world’s biggest trade show, with almost every country represented. There is nothing else like it.
The vast majority of the tens of thousands of people attending COP30 are there to sell and buy stuff, including oil, natural gas, and even coal. Climate policy has little to do with it. This is by far the world’s biggest trade show, with almost every country represented. There is nothing else like it.
Pre-registration for COP30 is around 56,000, the second highest in COP history. Total attendance might be 70,000 or more. The press often talks as though all these people are somehow involved in the climate deliberations, but that is wildly false.
The number of actual in-the-building negotiators is likely fewer than a thousand. It is possibly a lot less, as that would be five per country, and some countries only send two or three people. Many countries have several negotiators as negotiations often proceed in multiple simultaneous work groups. So, let’s say it is a thousand.
There are also around a thousand journalists, several thousand activist observers, and likely several thousand conference support staff.
So suppose there are ten thousand people directly involved in the negotiations as doers, helpers, and watchers. What do the other 60,000 or so people do? Well, for a start, many of them man (person?) the endless pavilions, booths, and presentations going on outside the negotiations building. Many others attend this carnival.
Many countries have pavilions. Some, like China’s, are whole buildings. There are also components of countries like states and cities. But then, there are big businesses and multi-national corporations that develop projects in and sell to countries and their components. There are even big financial institutions. The show is enormous.
CFACT’s team in Belém has reported on some of these heavy hitters. See, for example, Peter Murphy’s “COP30: Traversing the UN Green Zone. Corporations and government PR on full display for the Amazon” here.
They also talk to each other, and this is where I am sure many deals get done. Plus, there are lots of people who come just to deal with the people in the show.
On the funny side, a few COPs ago, the UN started asking registrants about their ties to oil and gas companies. There turned out to be well over a thousand per COP, which is as many, or more than, the number of negotiators. I am sure a lot of oil and gas deals get started here. In fact, at COP28, the COP president, himself an oil executive, got yelled at for talking about making such deals.
Countries do business in a lot of areas besides oil and gas, from airplanes to agriculture. It would be fun to assess all the shows for the range of businesses potentially involved.
There is no other get-together in the world even remotely like these COPs. Senior people from most countries and a lot of big businesses all talking to each other around the clock for well over a week. I envision 100,000 elevator pitches.
The number of people here to talk about climate change is probably relatively small, say just 15%. Most are here to see and be seen, to sell and to buy, or at least to start talking about that. This might actually make these otherwise stupid COPs valuable. Imagine that!
…we are the “Red Team”; the “Blue Team” has had their say since the late 1980s.
July 31st, 2025 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
…we are the “Red Team”; the “Blue Team” has had their say since the late 1980s.
PREFACE:What follows are my own opinions, not seen by my four co-authors of the Dept. of Energy report just released, entitled A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate. Starting sometime tomorrow, the comment docket at DOE will be open for anyone to post comments regarding the contents of that report. We authors will read all comments, and for those which are substantiative and serious, we will respond in a serious manner. Where we have made mistakes in the report, we will correct them.That is the formal process for adjudicating these issues. Regarding the informal process, tomorrow I expect we will agree on how to handle media requests to respond to objections from the few “climate alarmist” scientists that journalists usually turn to for such comments. To those journalists I would say: read our report, as journalists used to do; you might be surprised to learn a lot of the published science does not support what the public has been led (by you) to believe.
Yes, Increasing CO2 Causes a Warming Tendency in the Climate System… So What?
In my experience, much of the public has splintered into tribal positions on climate change: We either believe increasing CO2 (mainly from fossil fuel burning) has no effect, or we believe it is causing an existential crisis. There are a smaller number of individuals somewhere in the center (climate independents?)
But there is a lot of room between those two extremes for the truth to reside. Among other things, our report presents the evidence supporting the view that (1) long-term warming has been weaker than expected; (2) it’s not even known how much of that warming is due to human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; (3) there are good reasons to believe the warming and increasing CO2 effects on agriculture have so far been more beneficial than harmful to humanity; (4) there have been no long-term changes in severe weather events than can be tied to human GHG emissions; and (5) the few dozen climate models now being used to inform policymakers regarding energy policy are not fit for purpose.
Those models, even after decades of improvement, still produce up to a factor of 3 disagreement between those with the least warming and with the most warming (and ALL produce more summertime warming in the critically-important U.S. Corn Belt than has been observed). How can models that are advertised to be based upon “basic physical principles” cause such a wide range of responses to increasing CO2?
And there are many more than those 5 elements contained in our report; those are just my favorites as I sit here thinking at 4:30 a.m.
One of the things we did not delve into was costs versus benefits of energy policies. Clearly, the politically popular switch to energy sources from only wind and solar involves large tradeoffs. If it were not so, there would already be a rapid transition underway from fossil fuels to wind and solar. Yes, those “renewable” sources are growing, and becoming less expensive. Yet, global energy demand is growing apace. But there are practical problems which make ideas such as “Net Zero emissions” essentially impossible to achieve. Maybe that will change in the distant future, who knows? I personally don’t really care where our energy comes from as long as it is abundant, available where it is needed, and is cost-effective. But I won’t buy an EV until it can transport me 920 miles in 14 hours during winter.
But I digress. Yes, recent warming is likely mostly due to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. But is this necessarily a bad thing, in the net? Cold weather kills far more people than hot weather. Increasing CO2 is causing global greening and contributing to increased agricultural yields. These are things that need to be part of the national conversation, and things our Report begins to address.
Virtually everyone on Earth endures huge changes in weather throughout the year, with as much as 130 deg. F swings in temperature. Can we really not adapt to 2 or 3 degrees more in the yearly average?
Sure, if we can “fix” the “problem” without sending us back to the Stone Age, then do it. But the public has been grossly misled about what that would entail in terms of human suffering (energy is required for literally everything we do), and they have been grossly misled about how much climate change has actually occurred. Read the report.
Why Would Climate Science Be Biased Toward a Specific Outcome?
I’m old enough to remember when climate change meant the global cooling resulting from particulate pollution in the atmosphere. And there was a lot of that pollution as late as the 1970s. In the 1960s during my family’s car trips between Iowa and Pennsylvania, every pass through Gary, Indiana was dreaded. You could see maybe one or two blocks away, because there was so much industrial pollution. I could not understand how anyone could live in those conditions.
Then the EPA was formed in 1970. Messes were cleaned up, on land, in the air, and in our waterways. We came to believe any environmental problem we created could be fixed.
Then we had the ozone depletion scare. With the Montreal Protocol signed in 1987 the countries of the world agreed to gradually phase out production of chlorinated compounds that are believed to cause destruction of the protective ozone layer in the stratosphere.
Finally came the Big Kahuna of manmade pollution: Carbon Dioxide, and fears of global warming. By the late 1980s the U.N. formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to evaluate the science of greenhouse gases and how they affect the climate system. Large amounts of federal funds went into this new area of science.
In the early 1990s I visited Robert (Bob) Watson at the White House who was Al Gore’s science advisor on environmental matters. Bob, a stratospheric chemist, was instrumental in getting the 1987 Montreal Protocol established. In that meeting, Bob remarked on the formation of the IPCC something to the effect of, “We are now regulating ozone-depleting chemicals, and carbon dioxide is next”.
I was astounded that the policy goal had already been decided, and now all we needed to do was to fund enough science to support that goal. That was how I interpreted his statement.
In the early years the IPCC was relatively unbiased in its assessments, and conclusions were tentative. All scientists, whether climate alarmists or skeptics, were allowed to participate. But as the years went by, those with skeptical viewpoints (e.g. John Christy) were no longer invited to participate as lead authors of IPCC report chapters.
Other scientists simply chose to stop participating because their science was being misrepresented (e.g. Chris Landsea from the National Hurricane Center, who thought the hurricane data did not support any human influences.)
Today, global warming is big business. According to Grok, since 1990 the U.S. Government has spent $120-$160 Billion on climate change research. As one of the NASA instrument lead scientists on “Mission to Planet Earth”, I was also a beneficiary of that funding, and most of my funding over the years has come from climate-related appropriations.
So, why is climate science biased? First, when we decided that essentially 100% of research funding would come from the government, we put politicians (and thus policy goals) either directly or indirectly in charge of that funding.
Second, Congress only funds problems to be studied… not non-problems. As President Eisenhower warned us in his 1961 farewell address, these forces could lead to a situation where “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite”.
That has now happened. We now have a marching army of scientists (myself included) whose careers depend upon that climate funding, and possibly trillions of dollars in renewable energy infrastructure in the private sector dependent upon the whims of government regulation and mandates. If the climate change threat were to disappear, so would the government grants and regulations and private investments.
As they say, follow the money.
I used to say there are two kinds of scientists in the world: male and female. (Now I’m probably not even allowed to say that). My point was that scientists are regular people. They have their own opinions and worldviews. I went into a science field because I thought science had answers. How naive of me. I should have been an engineer, instead. In the field of climate science (and many other sciences) two researchers can look at the same data and come to totally opposite conclusions. Your data can be perfect, but what the data mean in terms of cause and effect is often not obvious. With engineering, either it works or it doesn’t.
We proved this cause-vs-effect conundrum in the context of climate feedbacks (positive feedbacks amplify climate warming, negative feedbacks reduce it) back in 2011 in this paper. We showed that natural variations in clouds, if not accounted for, can make the climate system seem very sensitive (lots of warming) when in fact it is insensitive (little warming).
The morning that (peer-reviewed) paper appeared in the journal Remote Sensing, the journal editor publicly apologized for letting it be published and was (we believe) forced to resign. Who forced him? Well, from the Climategate emails we get a hint: as it was revealed by one of the “gatekeepers” of climate publications, “[name redacted by me] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
That same morning I was called by a particle physicist who heard all of this news and said something to the effect of, “What’s wrong with you climate guys? We have people who believe in string theory and those who don’t, but we still work together”. We both laughed over the divisive nature of climate science compared to other sciences.
Which tells you there is more than science — and even more than money — involved in the disagreement. Every environmental scientist I have ever met believes Nature is fragile. That is not a scientific view, but it is a view that colors how they interpret data, and then what they tell environmental news reporters as it is passed on to the public.
Finally, wouldn’t everyone like to work on something that can make a difference in the world? And what higher calling could there be than to Save the Earth™?
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