In the ’80s I was writing a news release for a mortgage broker that arranged financing for an office tower.

I was referred to the architect to find out how many square feet were in the building. His answer: “How many square feet do you need?” It was revealing because the value of a building was a multiple of its rentable space. Thus more square feet meant more value.

No doubt his number became a cell in a spreadsheet that generated an “official” presentation that looked airtight. After all, numbers never lie, right? Especially when they come from a computer.

Within days, government leaders are convening in Copenhagen to draft an agreement to deal with a climate “crisis” that has been predicted by computer models conjured by scientists.

Most will blithely ignore the recent revelation — part of the ClimateGate scandal — that the computer code cranking out the doomsday scenarios was buggy. As Megan McArdle observed:

The emails seem to describe a model which frequently breaks, and being constantly “tweaked” with manual interventions of dubious quality in order to make them fit the historical data.  These stories suggest that the model, and the past manual interventions, are so poorly documented that CRU cannot now replicate its own past findings.

That is a big problem.  The IPCC report, which is the most widely relied upon in policy circles, uses this model to estimate the costs of global warming.  If those costs are unreliable, then any cost-benefit analysis is totally worthless.

Sounds a bit like, “How many degrees do you need?”