Those in the climate business make a move to loot the treasury.

The meeting called for an ongoing project aimed at understanding and modelling the climate system well enough to provide the sorts of prediction that policy-makers and other stakeholders need — or, at the very least, to show why such prediction might not, in fact, be achievable. Key to this project would be one or more dedicated facilities offering world-class computational resources to the climate-modelling community. . .

After all, the fastest computers are nearly always paid for out of the world's public purses, often for use in areas of national security such as communications intelligence or nuclear weapons design. And climate prediction is a national security issue if ever there was one.

If funding agencies were to embrace such a goal, the implications would go well beyond money. Profound changes would be required of the community itself. Because the cost over a decade or more might easily top a billion dollars, such an investment in cutting-edge climate modelling would all but certainly have to be done multinationally, or even globally. This would pull climate modelling into the world of 'big science' alongside space telescopes and particle accelerators — a transformation that would require new, and possibly disruptive, institutional arrangements. . .

But advances in supercomputing do make it easier to build computers formerly known as super: a petaflop will seem slow in less than a decade. A world facility where teams of researchers try out very high resolutions and new techniques, and where software engineers and programmers learn how to get the most out of bleeding-edge hardware, will require a network of more modest centres around the world from which to draw its problem-list and into which to feed its insights.

I suspect that if the climate modelling community got no more attention than it gets now that they would be in the same place 10 years from now as they would be if the grand scheme came about. Advances in hardware and software will occur for other reasons. It is only the bureaucracy that would otherwise not come about, and that's a good thing.

Arguing that climate modelling, like nuclear weapons design, is a national security issue and so should get lavish funding, is simply laughable. We would do well to defund most of the national security boondoggles rather than indulging in ever more of them.

Rent seekers often argue that past grand projects - moon shots and such - caused advances that benefited society. This is nonsense. The advances would have happened in any event as science progressed and engineering became more precise. It isn't even clear that the advances were accelerated since there were opportunity costs for the grand projects, things that weren't done in a timely fashion for lack of attention as talent was drained off for mega projects.

Worse, I think, the argument that policy-makers need predictions is simply false. Policies have almost nothing to do with reality. They don't set useful goals or implement systems to achieve useful outcomes. All they do is reward the guilty and fleece the innocent. Pretending that they have greater authority due to predictions fails to grapple with the reality of politics.

It's time for us to move beyond twentieth century, cold war, grand project thinking, time to mature a bit by learning the lessons of those past failures. Climate management will not be achieved by political machinations, it will come from technological advance. If society as a whole seeks to help such advances in some way the first task is to understand that no one knows what they will be. So, a venture capital approach is more appropriate. Invest modestly in many technologies, hoping that some of them bear fruit.

Rather than spending billions on modelling and prediction, spread it around among investigators that are pursuing actual solutions, chiefly advanced energy systems. Even if the climate modellers have been utterly mistaken, or discover that "prediction might not, in fact, be achievable", we still need advanced energy systems. Climate problems or not, we need them. Let's not squander any more treasure on political shenanigans. Stick to the knitting.

Update: Said another way.

Politics is mostly ... about offering up convenient scapegoats and instant solutions for voters' complaints, even if the villains and promises are often false. We in the media bless this process by treating much of the self-serving rhetoric with undeserved seriousness. Is it any wonder that our genuine problems persist year after year and, in the end, foster public cynicism?

[via Robin Hanson: Honest Politics . . . nyet]