Well, if everyone were jumping off a cliff would you go do it too:

Professor Scott Armstrong is at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr Kesten Green is with the Business and Economic Forecasting Unit at Monash University. They're experts in forecasting techniques. (Many people are unaware that forecasting is a subject with many academic experts and a body of research going back to the 1930s. The website forecastingprinciples.com attracts more than 200,000 visitors a year.) Their paper is Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists Versus Scientific Forecasts. It was written for the 27th Annual International Symposium on Forecasting.
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Armstrong and Green rated the methodology used by [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Working Group 1] against 89 principles of good forecasting derived from years of research. They found that the panel report breached 72 of those principles. They concluded that the forecasts the weather was likely to change in many negative ways were worthless.
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Armstrong and Green note: "To our knowledge, there is no empirical evidence to suggest that presenting opinions in mathematical terms rather than in words will contribute to forecast accuracy."

I've actually found it quite remarkable how many prominent news outlets (the Economist quickly comes to mind) not only seem to accept the precepts of the green crowd, but seem to be evangelizing them. Green truly does seem to be the new yellow.

It may surprise some, but we've actually done quite a few things the greener side of the peanut gallery would approve of. We use CF lights extensively, a computerized thermostat that shuts the A/C and/or heat off when we're not home, and while our PT Cruiser is by no means the most efficient car in the world it's a whole lot better than most, and we carpool besides.

But we do these things because they benefit us economically, not because "we should." Were the greens more interested in improving people's lives than they were in pushing their watermelon agendas, I imagine their successes would come at a walk.

Pity...

Via Instapundit.