Other Crap

"Climate chaos? Don't believe it"

• I don't know whether the article is solid, but it brought back some vaguely-related memories. I worked for a large public company in the 1980s as the head of the strategic planning department. In order to effect a leveraged buy-out, certain financial forecasts had to be made. The calculations "needed" by senior management required an average increase in same-store sales of six percent per year after adjusting for inflation. In the previous thirteen years (the only years for which we had a dependable database), the same-store sales growth had never been below 3% or above 4%. It was the most predictable thing in the world of business. If you simply predicted 3.5% every year, you could not be off by more than a half of a percent. If the company expected the best marketing initiatives in its history, better than all the great things it had done in the past, I could have bought in to a full 4% per year for a couple of consecutive years, but I would have been extremely skeptical even of that modest number. To assume it would rise to 6% was completely ridiculous under any circumstances. But that assumption was necessary, so it was used. My department (which was normally in charge of sales forecasts) refused to produce the paper, so the financial guys did it, just plugging in the top-line numbers necessary to produce the desired results.
• Needless to say, the result of the attempted LBO was Chapter 11, when the company could not produce the cash flow necessary to meet the terms of the buy-out. I would literally have bet my life and my life savings on that. The six percent sales increase was approximately as likely as a meteor destroying your house. Although that company was one of America's signature institutions, the company ended up in the hands of the Japanese.
• Imagine my reaction when I read this sentence in the linked story: "The UN's predictions are founded on an excessive rate of increase in airborne carbon dioxide. The true rate has been 0.38 per cent year-on-year since records began in 1958. The models assume 1 per cent per annum, more than two and a half times too high." Apparently it is not only plutocrats, but also scientists who plug in whatever numbers they need to make their models work.