In defence of Jordan Peterson on Climate Change

In a recent Joe Rogan podcast (Joe Rogan), Jordan Peterson expressed an idea he has visited before, that climate was not predictable, because the prediction errors “grew like compound interest”.

I admire Jordan Peterson immensely. Hard to prove, of course, but I think him to be the most authoritative public intellectual alive right now. He has been through the fire and back, but he’s still out there, writing books and trying to heal us.

However, he’s an eminent psychologist, not a climate scientist. So, does he deserve the volleys of abuse he’s received for daring to comment on the sacred cow of climate change?

Jordan Peterson, as a scientist, is good at maths, especially Stats. This comes with the territory. In the hard sciences and my discipline of computer science almost all new work requires some kind of mathematical analysis. In his discipline, where many sources of uncertainty are present, proofs often rest on statistics. This makes a good psychologist acutely aware of the uncertainties involved in all evidence.

Jordan Peterson is not the first person with good maths skills to look at the arguments of climate science and find them wanting.

The engineer and designer of the first commercial rocket to reach space, Burt Rutan, famously looked into the maths of climate science and reeled at the poor quality of the analysis and the dubious results created (Larry Bell). He even took a year out to lecture on this, to no avail. The…