Short summary: I now worry less about global warming than I did, the scientific evidence is that it’s not going to be catastrophic. PS Our best course of action is to adapt to the effects and to invest in R&D to develop new low carbon energy.

I used it to to rally my colleagues in the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute — “how could we contribute to the solution?” I asked..........................

But then the forecasting scientists in the Institute told me that the forecasts of global warming were not to be trusted. They pointed out that climate scientists were not forecasting scientists, that climate scientists were ignorant of the established principles that help improve the very difficult business of making forecasts (ie predicting the future) in complex conditions, and that their forecasting approaches were a very long way from best practice.

But look at your own field”, said the forecasting scientists… “what do you think of the consensus of views among marketing academics, do you think this represents real knowledge or rather “group think?”

Based on the forecasting principle of “be conservative” Scott Armstrong proposed a ‘no change’ forecast, which was a bit radical given that everyone knew the climate was warming slowly. The competition wasn’t compared to Al Gore’s dramatic “tipping point” forecast, but instead to the more accepted IPCC forecast of 3 degrees of warming over the next 100 years. Ten years later and Scott Armstrong’s forecast turned out to be more accurate.

Climate scientists are now working out why their predictions were wrong, and how to improve them (some climate scientists claim that with a better understanding of multi-decade variations in speed of warming “the long-term warming trend in response to human emission of greenhouse gases is found remarkably steady since 1910 at 0.07°–0.08°C decade”).

Global warming is not a existential threat. Global warming means the world is getting hotter (milder winters, hotter summers). Which is of most concern for those who already live in hot places (like Adelaide or Dubai) but probably quite welcome if you live in Northern Europe, China, or America. Each year far more people die due to cold than from heat, even in Australia six times more deaths are due to cold than heat. And most of this isn’t from extremes but rather simply cold winters, and global warming means warmer winters (that’s something the climate scientists all agree upon).

Wildfires are not increasing, “Instead, global area burned appears to have overall declined over past decades, and there is increasing evidence that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago”. Globally, the total acreage burned by fires declined 24 percent between 1998 and 2015. It appears that changes in agricultural practices are more than offsetting the increased fire risk now that they world is 1 degree warmer.

NASA says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.