As the world suffers through a mix of weather (warm winter temperatures) in the continental US and climate (cold weather) in Alaska and Europe, some interesting new numbers are starting to trickle in.

Preliminary reports from the Energy Information Administration’s “Annual Energy Outlook” (which will be fully published in April) suggest that any carbon crisis may not be quite as imminent as thought. Not so long ago, the EIA predicted carbon emissions levels would rise by 37 percent between 2005 and 2035. The EIA — get this – now thinks that global CO2 emissions in 2025 will be 6 percent lower than they were in 2005.

Check the report for yourself, but to Via Meadia and others this looks like a serious reduction in the forecast of carbon emissions over the next couple decades. There are likely numerous reasons for the change; easier access to cleaner fuel sources like shale gas, the rising price of oil and cheapening of solar and wind are but several.

And there is one other thing that is clear: the people who put these forecasts together have no idea what they are doing.  This is one of the cases in which the use of the word forecast should be banned; these are guesses, not forecasts, and it’s a big deal.

The Chicken Littles of the green movement throw a lot of statistics, trends and projections together and claim the status of scientific truth for whatever big and scary numbers they can coax out of their statistical black box.  But even if the climate models are infallible or close to it and will need no more revisions as more information comes in (something that would be almost unique in the history of science) the economic models and projections that go into future CO2 level predictions are no better than any other economic models — which is to say they are almost no good at all.

To predict the amount of CO2 that human industry will be emitting in 2050, you need a figure for the world’s GDP by then.  That means you have to have long range forecasts for China, India, South Africa, Russia, Brazil, Germany, the US, Canada and many other countries. Nobody has any forecasts of the 50 year GDP growth of any of these countries that is worth anything at all, because economic forecasting doesn’t work that way.  (It hardly works at all, but certainly not on this long term basis.)

And then you have to forecast how much CO2 will be emitted per unit of GDP.  That involves forecasting the rate and nature of technological change, the state and composition of world energy reserves in thirty years, and many other things which simply cannot be known by anybody living today.

An astrologer would throw up his hands in dismay at this sloppy reasoning and hazy science.

The truth is that forecasts about greenhouse gas emissions are basically worthless.  These recent forecasts certainly were; the difference between 37 percent growth and 6 percent decline is 43 percent.  That is about the level of accuracy you could expect from a blind monkey throwing darts at a wall.

But without those worthless forecasts, climate math falls to the ground.  If we can’t predict the future level of greenhouse gas emissions, we can’t predict the future temperature of the earth — even assuming that our atmospheric models work perfectly and haven’t left anything out.

None of this suggests that we should ignore climate and energy issues, but it confirms my belief that climate activists tend to be bad logicians, and that the way forward has nothing to do with the cumbersome bureaucratic power grabs, crony capitalist porkfests (ethanol, Solyndra, high speed rail) and economic controls that misguided greens hope will save the planet.

Even the staunchest Eurocrats have to admit that the Greek intervention has been a disaster. Bailouts, debt write-downs, solemn agreements: nothing works and after two years of concentrated effort, Greece is still on the brink of default.  A strong piece in this morning’s NYT by Rachel Donadio explains a big part of the problem.

Look under the hood of the Greek government, and it’s easy to see why.  For decades — actually, centuries — government power in Greece (and in the Ottoman and Byzantine states that ruled what is now Greece in the past) has been feudal rather than modern.  It is about loyalties, obligations, patron-client relationships.

This nexus reflects the way society works. Political parties work this way; business has to work this system to survive.  Almost everyone in Greece benefits in some way from “connections” with the power machine, and without those connections, not much can get done.

The EU’s understandable and even laudable desire to help Greece reform is about trying to replace this tangled and deeply nested system with something modern: transparent institutions in which people do things by the rules. The technocrats in Brussels and Frankfurt want to rip the old system up by the roots because they know how inefficient and costly the current system is.

But this is a social and cultural revolution, not an economic reform.  Those revolutions must come from within; societies change deeply when they want to, not when foreign bankers put conditions on bailout agreements.  As Donadio’s story puts it:

In Greece, the government of the technocratic prime minister, Lucas Papademos, is proving powerless to transform an inefficient public administration that has long served as a power base for the same political leaders — including most of the current government’s ministers — who are now being asked to dismantle it.

It is a formula for gridlock that virtually guarantees, political and financial experts say, that the Greek government will never carry out the kind of basic changes that are being demanded of it.

Correct. The structures that make Greece work reflect powerful forces and assumptions at work in Greek society, and they can’t be changed quickly.  In some cases, they can’t be changed at all.

Donadio is pointing to a theme I wrote about in God and Gold.  The laws of economics may be true everywhere, but culture shapes the way people respond to these laws.  Culture changes over time — China’s response to capitalism is very different than it was in the nineteenth century — but these changes come in their own way and in their own time.  They cannot be whistled for, or imposed by decree.

It is hard to say whether one culture is more moral or ‘better’ than another in an absolute sense, but nothing is more clear than that some cultures are more effective than others when it comes to capitalism. Greek culture is an ancient and venerable edifice that has seen the Greek people through difficult times; it is, however, not very good at developing the kinds of institutional and market arrangements required for success in an era of competitive liberal capitalism.

The mismatch between the strengths of Greek culture and the requirements for capitalist success isn’t absolute; ask the Greek shipping magnates. But on the whole, countries like Greece don’t thrive under capitalism the way countries like Germany and the Netherlands do.  Other countries — think of Russia, Argentina and Egypt — have similar problems.

Greeks can’t — and shouldn’t — stop being Greek simply to make themselves more effective capitalist competitors.  They need to find new ways of being Greek that work better in a liberal capitalist world, but they need to do that at their own pace, not at one dictated by the ECB and the IMF.

Technocrats everywhere like to ignore the importance of culture in human affairs. Europe today is learning just how painful and expensive it is when culture isn’t given its due.  More lessons are coming.

The announcement by the US defense secretary that US troops will no longer take a lead role in Afghan combat before the end of 2013 stunned the Afghan government in Kabul but will probably please voters in the US.  It largely cuts the ground out from under the feet of negotiators; the Taliban cannot have much incentive to negotiate vital interests with a power so obviously bent on escape.

The move probably reflects several ideas that seem uppermost in Washington’s mind.  First, that the war cannot be won at a price the US would be well-advised to pay.  The Taliban cannot be destroyed on the battlefield as long as it has ISI backing and Washington cannot force the Taliban’s friends in Islamabad to stop supporting the group.  Second, that the Kabul government is a hopeless mess and will only stir itself when faced with the loss of its military support by the west — and maybe not even then.  Third, that the US has had enough success in breaking up Al Qaeda’s operations, and through drone strikes and other means, of attacking Al Qaeda’s remaining supporters in the region that protecting the homeland from Al Qaeda no longer requires a US war role in Afghanistan.

It will be hard for the US military to fight this assessment, even though many remain more optimistic than the White House. Public opinion has long been cool toward the Afghan war, and the death of bin Laden (rather than the construction of a stable and at least quasi-democratic Afghanistan) was the primary goal in the region that most Americans wanted achieved.  With bin Laden gone and Al Qaeda in disarray, it is hard to make a strong political case for further US involvement in the war.

Washington probably also hopes that others in the region — India, Russia, Iran, China — who do not want the Taliban back in Kabul for various reasons will concentrate on helping the current Kabul government develop a survival strategy. In any case, after concluding that there are no longer any great national interests tying the US to the future of Afghanistan, the Obama administration is moving to liquidate the war.