OPINION:
The fact that a studious work is not available on Amazon is enough to pique one’s curiosity. After all, Amazon usually gives the public access to nearly all books, including those on the extreme left and extreme right.
What about “The Plague of Models” makes it so dangerous for public consumption? Having carefully read the book, I can confirm that it is a thoughtful treatise for anyone who has ever done academic modeling or anyone who wants to know the important assumptions and limitations associated with modeling that is used to justify many environmental, health and safety regulations.
The author of “The Plague of Models” is certainly well qualified to comment at length on the good, the bad and the ugly of computer modeling. Kenneth P. Green has a doctorate in environmental science and engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, and has about 40 years of experience in modeling, public policy and regulations.
The primary focus of “The Plague of Models” is “the nexus of risk models and coercive regulation” or, more specifically, relative to climate science, “the nexus of where abstracted model outputs and abstracted model predictions interact with the proliferation of regulation.”
The book begins dissecting modeling methods with something akin to “of mice and men,” where the argument is made that various lab animals are far from miniature humans. Such physical experimentation with laboratory analogs has been used to develop models related to food additives. Hefty chemical dosages suffered by mice and rats, for instance, are extrapolated to suggest that people can be at risk from exposure to, at times, even trace amounts of such chemicals. The book delivers some helpful, confirming details on how human beings are not rodents.
The book goes on to investigate how numerical models were used to set air pollution standards for ground-level ozone and particulate matter. For modeling of air pollutants targeted by the 1970 federal Clean Air Act, people were concerned, even in the late 1970s, “that actual empirical data was being replaced with abstract mathematical models of risk.”
The use of modeling to generate ever-onerous federal government regulations is continued in subsequent chapters: one that deals with stratospheric ozone depletion and one that concentrates on catastrophic climate change caused by human activity.
Each of these chapters captures the essence of the history, development and use of models to influence public policy and regulatory targets. The chapter on climate change rightly explores the evolution of thinking from the authority and premier source of atmospheric angst: the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCC was initiated in 1988 to “prepare a comprehensive review and recommendations with respect to the state of knowledge of the science of climate change,” including related social and economic impacts of climate change. Several IPCC assessment reports have been produced over the decades and have relied heavily on rather debatable modeling. The content of these reports has then been referenced to drive policy and regulatory decisions worldwide.
In writing the penultimate chapter on COVID-19, the author expected to be deemed “some kind of heretic” (and apparently so, at least by certain Amazonians). After sorting through statistics relevant to the virus and germane modeling, the author states that computer modeling of COVID-19 risk was not “the cause of the vast panoply of horrendous public policy, rules, and regulations promulgated in dealing with COVID-19, some of which will haunt us forever.
“But modeling of the potential value of COVID-19 risk-mitigation interventions did indeed play such a role, and should be a cautionary tale for the future, because they enabled panicked governments to implement intervention policies that, while completely untested, were nearly guaranteed to cause massive harm to people’s lives, employment, and economies that would last many years beyond the pandemic itself.”
The book concludes with a chapter on reasonable “Treatment Options for the Plague of Models.” It includes a call for more objectivity and realism and the limited use of models to inform public policy and subsequent environmental, health and safety regulations.
“The Plague of Models” is an easy read, peppered with humor. The book amply demonstrates that a mouse is not a miniature person on four legs that can faithfully model human characteristics, nor is a computer simulation to be trusted with trillions of dollars in investment to forestall a futuristic scenario of a global climate cataclysm.
As a professional who relied on atmospheric modeling for nearly all of my career of 40-plus years, I highly recommend the meticulous perspective proffered in “The Plague of Models.”
Kudos to Barnes & Noble and other freethinking outlets where “The Plague of Models” is available for public enlightenment.
• Anthony J. Sadar, a certified consulting meteorologist, is an adjunct associate professor at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and the author of “In Global Warming We Trust: Too Big to Fail” (Stairway Press).
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The Plague of Models: How Computer Modeling Corrupted Environmental, Health and Safety Regulations
By Kenneth P. Green
Fullerene Publishing Inc., March 2023, 242 pages, $17.99
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