farmdoc's blog post number 152

One of my favourite New Yorker sections is ‘The Financial Page’ that James Surowiecki writes. Surowiecki’s book, The Wisdom of Crowds is also fascinating. It’s subtitled ‘Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations’. And it demonstrates convincingly, to me anyway, that the many are definitely smarter than the few. And so to global warming. Some years ago the few, mainly scientists, concluded global warming was both real and man-made. As evidence has mounted, so the few have become the crowd, and consequently the climate sceptics and deniers are now the few. That’s because the tipping point has been reached. One member of the current few is The Old Farmer’s Almanac – America’s oldest continuously printed periodical. Its masthead says it’s been published every year since 1792. (I can’t tell if the ‘Old’ refers to the farmer or the almanac.) Based on sunspots, the Almanac’s founder, Robert B Thomas, devised a climate-predicting formula that has remained secret. This formula predicts several upcoming decades of global cooling – not warming. I’m not saying, and I doubt Surowieki would either, that the few can never be correct. But I find it hard to understand how a 216-year-old formula can predict climate better than modern scientific instruments and computer models. Anyway I’m not parting with my thermal long johns just yet.