John Quiggin Scores Again

Robert Waldmann

I am very glad that John Quiggin has found a group even less worthy or respect than us macroeconomists. He writes

It seemed for a little while as if the delusionists had scored another win, when Phil Jones, the scientist who has been most viciously target by the hackers/harassers gave an honest answer to a deliberately loaded question prepared by them and put to him in a BBC interview

BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

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Looking at the responses of ’sceptics’ to this episode we can distinguish four or five sets (depending on your views about set theory)

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5. Those genuine sceptics who pointed out the dishonesty of the claim, and called out those on their own side of the debate who promoted it. Obviously, members of this set deserve some serious respect and attention in the future. Unfortunately, the intersection between this set and the set of “sceptics” in the currently prevailing sense appears to be the empty set[2]

That’s 5 sets Professor Quiggin. It’s also statistically significant evidence that global warming skeptics are, on average, either more clueless, more dishonest or both than the general population. Also the data set does not contain statistically significant evidence against the hypothesis that all global warming skeptics are incapable of understanding basic statistics, recklessly irresponsible and total liars.

Quiggin assumes that most are only one or two of these things, but there is no evidence for his belief in the data set he analyses.

Thin comfort for macroeconomics. What Quiggin has shown is that climate science is science, just as he has shown that macroeconomic science is not science in “Zombie Economics.”