The Global Warming Challenge

Here’s one: “Demographers agree almost unanimously… thirty years from now,… the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine”. (The “almost unanimously” claim might sound familiar to those who have been paying any attention to the media coverage of the current global warming alarm.)

If you’ve got the stomach for it, The Daily Caller provides a list of “7 enviro predictions from Earth Day 1970 that were just dead wrong”. That the alarming forecasts were so wrong should be of no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the Golden Rule of Forecasting, or with Kesten Green and Scott Armstrong’s study of analogies to the global warming alarm.

The Daily Caller article, available here, describes the forecasts and the  very different outcomes. The directions of the errors is all in the same direction. A reasonable person might wonder if, in addition to ignorance of other aspects of good forecasting practice, bias played an important role.

While, after 99 months of the Climate Bet, Mr Gore’s forecast errors are 37% larger than Professor Armstrong’s, it is mathematically possible for Mr Gore to win. For that to happen, however, the global average temperature anomaly would have to stay around the average of the first three months of this year, +0.7°C. We will keep you posted!