I was recently reminded of a joke from the days when I was an ad executive (before I became a lawyer).

Client: What time is it?

Ad Exec (looking at watch): What time would you like it to be?

It made me realize the similarity between advertising advice and mathematical modelling used to justify decisions about both climate change and COVID-19.

Politician: How scary is the model forecast?

Modeler: How scary would you like it to be?

What they have in common is that the client gets the answer they want. This brings me to the misuse of models by much of the media and many politicians, to make really uninformed political decisions about important issues like climate change and Covid-19.

Continue reading “Corona Virus and Climate Change Models: How Scary Would You Like it to Be?”