The Global Warming Challenge

Submitted by J Scott Armstrong, Kesten C Green, and Willie Soon

Our research findings challenge the basic assumptions of the State Department’s Fifth U.S. Climate Action Report (CAR 2010). The alarming forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming are not the product of proper scientific evidence-based forecasting methods. Furthermore, there have been no validation studies to support a belief that the forecasting procedures used were nevertheless appropriate for the situation. As a consequence, alarming forecasts of global warming are merely the opinions of some scientists and, for a situation as complicated and poorly understood as global climate, such opinions are unlikely to be as accurate as forecasts that global temperatures will remain much the same as they have been over recent years. Using proper forecasting procedures we predict that the global warming alarm will prove false and that government actions in response to the alarm will be shown to have been harmful.

Whether climate will change over the 21^st Century, by how much, in what direction, to what effect, and what if anything people could and should do about any changes are all forecasting problems. Given that policy makers currently do not have access to scientific forecasts for any of these, the policies that have been proposed with the avowed purpose of reducing dangerous manmade global warming—such as are described in CAR 2010 Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7—are likely to cause serious and unnecessary harm.

In this comment on CAR 2010, we summarize findings from our research on forecasting climate. Most of our findings have been published in the peer-reviewed literature and all have been presented at scientific meetings. They are easily accessible on the Internet and we provide links to them.

(A pdf copy of the document, with links, is available here.)

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What if Mr. Gore had accepted Professor Armstrong’s proposed ten-year bet on climate change in 2007? Gore said that the temperature would go up while Armstrong predicted it would not change from the 2007 average. We assumed a relatively conservative prediction from Mr. Gore of a 0.03 degrees Centigrade increase per year: the central projection of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Over the years 2008 and 2009, Mr Gore’s forecast was closer than Professor Armstrong’s to the actual monthly temperature in only four of the 24 months. Put another way Mr Gore’s forecast was 0.26 degrees too warm in 2008 and 0.08 degrees in 2009, whereas Professor Armstrong’s was 0.23 degrees too warm in 2008 and 0.02 degrees to warm in 2009.

We use the University of Alabama at Huntsville’s satellite measure of the global lower atmosphere temperature anomaly as our actual temperature in order to avoid the problems identified by researchers and, more recently, the release of the “Climategate” emails, with the Hadley Centre series used by the IPCC.

Professor Armstrong said that one must be cautious about small samples. The amount of variability in annual temperature is high relative to the predicted change, so Armstrong said that he expects to lose in some years. As shown by a 150-year simulation of the bet, he said that he had only a bit better than 50% chance of winning a given year, but this jumps to nearly 70% for ten years. Armstrong said, “it is about as certain as one can be in forecasting that I would win if the bet were for 100 years, but I wanted to see what would happen, so I proposed only ten years.”

You can follow the bet on a monthly basis here at theclimatebet.com. In addition you can see what one betting market expects to happen.

Using a forecasting method that they have developed, Dr. J. Scott Armstrong from the Wharton School and Dr. Kesten C. Green from the International Graduate School of Business at the University of South Australia conclude that alarm over “dangerous manmade global warming” is the latest example of a common social phenomenon involving alarming but unscientific forecasts that prove to be wrong. This is a preliminary finding from the “global warming analogies forecasting project.” The researchers stressed that the findings are preliminary because they are still collecting and coding information on similar situations from the past.

Armstrong and Green used a method known as “structured analogies.” For the global warming analogies forecasting project, the method first involved conducting a wide and objective search for situations similar to the alarm over forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming. For each analogous situation the forecasting procedures used by the alarmists and the actual outcomes of the situations were coded. The structured analogies procedures had previously been shown to provide excellent forecasts compared to those from commonly used alternative procedures.

To date, 71 situations have been proposed and 26 of them were found to meet all criteria of similarity. Of the latter, none were based on forecasts from scientific procedures. Instead they were based on dramatic speculation of one sort or another.

Typically, the alarmists recommend government action, and governments usually respond. They did so in 25 of the 26 analogous situations, and government took action in 23.

We asked: How many of the 26 analogous alarming forecasts were accurate?

The answer is “none”.

In how many of the 23 analogies were the government solutions shown to be helpful?

None. In fact, in 20 situations there was substantial long-term harm from the government solutions.

The authors are hopeful that the continuing evidence on the anti-scientific procedures used by people involved in the manmade global warming alarmist movement, such as has been exposed by ClimateGate, will help to reduce the damage from the alarm in the long run. However, the analogies offered little hope on that score. Most of the previous alarms, such as over DDT and electromagnetic fields, continued to cause substantial harm many years after they had been shown to be false.

Julian Simon and others had suggested that such a pattern exists for forecasts of doom, but we were surprised at the strength of our findings. In retrospect, the findings seem less surprising. Extreme events are difficult to forecast, especially in complex and uncertain situations. So the application of unscientific forecasting procedures supported by politics would be unlikely to produce useful forecasts.

The authors stress that this is an early progress report. They hope to stimulate global warming alarmists to propse analogies that support their forecasts. They also suggest that all important public policy forecasts would benefit by using the structured analogies method.

For the latest summary of this research, go to their paper, “Effects of the Global Warming Alarm.”

For further information, contact Armstrong@wharton.upenn.edu or kesten@me.com

A simple model was found to produce forecasts that are over seven times more accurate than forecasts from the procedures used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

This important finding is reported in an article titled “Validity of climate change forecasting for public policy decision making” in the latest issue of the International Journal of Forecasting. It is the result of collaboration among forecasters J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School, Kesten C. Green of the University of South Australia, and climate scientist Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. more...

Climategate is the opening up of a world that has been well known to scientists who are skeptical about the claim that we are faced with dangerous manmade global warming.

That world includes fudged data, refusal to disclose data and methods, removing evidence that challenges global warming dogma from Wikipedia entries, failure to cite disconfirming evidence in papers and IPCC reports, drawing conclusions that go beyond the data, violations of proper scientific procedures in collecting and analyzing data, ad hominem arguments, promulgation of alarming but unsupported forecasts, failure to correct errors that have been pointed out in the literature, uncivil behavior, disrupting scientific talks with protestors, directing government funds to those who subscribe to the dogma, providing government funds for research studies designed to support the dogma, putting out false or misleading “findings,” cancelling stories that had been scheduled for publication in newspapers, firing skeptics, death threats, and so on.

These are the signs of a dangerous political movement, not of a scientific issue.

Skeptical scientist have been telling editors in the popular media about the scandal of government sponsored climate science for years. Why have they been so reluctant to expose the scandal?

Other opinions on ClimateGate, some which seem sensible and others strange to us as scientists, are available from the New York Times, Glenn Beck, the Wall Street Journal, the London Telegraph.

Lord Monckton, science advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, issued a fresh challenge to Al Gore on the Glenn Beck show. Monckton urged Gore to take the opportunity to publicize the issue of “manmade global warming” on international television. Raising the heat further, Monckton suggested that if Gore was not prepared to debate the issue, he should refrain from further public comment. The think tank CEI, are supporting Monckton’s call by offering “big bucks” to Gore if he will make himself available for a debate. See the video of Monckton’s call and CEI’s offer and CEI’s media release.

Some things are hard to forecast. In such cases forecasters find it hard to beat a simple prediction that things will not change. When Kesten Green, Scott Armstrong, and Willie Soon tested the forecast of global average temperatures apparently preferred by Al Gore (the IPCC’s +0.03C per year scenario) for the years of exponential CO2 emissions growth from 1851 to 1975, they found the IPCC “forecast” errors were more than seven times bigger than the no-change benchmark errors. Their International Journal of Forecasting paper is available, here.

Lord Christopher Monckton read the proposed Copenhagen agreement and concluded that, unless U.S. citizens are able to pressure their government to not sign the agreement at the December 2009 summit, unelected world government and large transfers of wealth from developed countries to undeveloped ones will result. Listen to the rousing conclusion to his 14 October speech here.

Here is evidence from a child’s science project that increased temperatures in the U.S. over the 2oth Century can be attibuted to the urban heat island effect, and not “global warming”. (Large cities cover only a tiny fraction of the area of the Earth.) I urge others to independently replicate and extend this school boy’s experiment and to report the results. The findings of the study also provide a solution for those who remain concerned about warming: Abandon the cities!

For an earlier discussion of this issue, see Steve McIntyre’s 2007 essay “Trends in Peterson 2003″.

The September global mean temperature anomaly was +0.42C, a relatively warm month as the updated results graph in the right column shows. Armstrong was a clear winner for the 2008 year; with nine months of 2009 gone, what are the prospects of Gore winning 2009? With the average temperature anomaly for the year-to-date at +0.23C clearly below both Armstrong’s and Gore’s year-to-date forecasts of +0.28C and +0.33C respectively, Armstrong is looking good to win 2009. For Gore to win 2009 now, the average temperature anomaly for the remaining three months of 2009 would have to equal or exceed +0.535C. This has happened on only two previous occasions in the last 31 years, February to April and May to July 1998, during the warmest part of a strong El Nino cycle.