The Global Warming Challenge

The warming alarmist Met Office’s own figures, released without fanfare last week, show no global warming for 16 years. Does that mean we have had 16 years of “dangerous manmade global equilibrity”? Or should that be, 16 years of “beneficial manmade global temperateness”? Who’d have guessed? As readers of these pages will know, this is just what Kesten Green, Scott Armstrong, and Willie Soon found to be the best forecast of global mean temperatures in their paper titled “Validity of climate change forecasting for public policy decision making“: No change. This is also the forecast that Scott Armstrong has issued to challenge Al Gore’s forecast of alarming manmade warming. The Mail‘s article is here, and their temperature graph is below. Further discussion is provided by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, here.

In a 6 September piece in The Washington Times, Willie Soon and William Briggs bring the long history of research on the connection between solar activity and Earthly temperatures up-to-date. We have reproduced the chart that appears in the article, below. For more on the relationship between the solar radiation hitting the Earth and maximum daytime temperatures, see the article, here. It is not obvious that carbon dioxide, the gas behind Al Gore and the IPCC’s dangerous manmade global warming alarmism, could explain any more of the variation in temperatures than is apparently already explained by the Sun.

We are still waiting for the dangerous warming that Mr Gore and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change promised us was already happening. With the satellite temperature data in for the month of March (see the bet-tracker graph to the right) we have had six months in a row of temperatures below the 2007 average upon which Scott Armstrong’s bet was based. Armstrong remains ahead overall, and the prospect of dangerous warming during the period of the bet looks increasingly remote.

With global mean temperatures again below the 30-year average, forecasts of manmade CO2 warming and drought must be looking doubtful even to the casual observer as she trudges through the snow in Europe or the US, or wonders what happened to summer in Australia. Indeed, when people with open minds are told they will have to pay, they start to pay attention and take the trouble to assess the evidence themselves. The Auditor General found that Australians weren’t persuaded by their government’s desperate attempts to convince them that making their energy expensive was a good idea.

The Gore-Armstrong climate bet has now completed four-tenths of its ten-year race with Scott Armstrong in the lead. The latest graph and data are available to the right. Click on the graph to show a larger version of the graph with the data. You will see that we finished 2011 with average global temperatures for the year slightly lower than the bet benchmark year of 2007.

While Professor Armstrong is confident that his no-change forecasting method is better than Gore and the IPCC’s +0.03C per annum unscientific extrapolation, ten years is short in climate terms, and Mr Gore is still in with a chance. To provide some perspective, climatologists sometimes use seven years as the duration of a climate period. Over the last seven years, the UAH global temperature anomaly series has trended upwards at a rate of 0.008C per year. The solar magnetic activity cycle has a period of about 11 year. Over the last 11 years, the temperature series has had a trend of +0.019C per year. The former trend is much closer to Prof Armstrong’s no-change forecast than it is to Mr Gore’s extrapolation, but the latter is somewhat closer to Mr Gore’s extrapolation. The trend for the entire 33 year period of the UAH temperature series, at +0.0138C per annum, marginally favors Prof Armstrong’s forecasting method and suggests that there is no reason for alarm.

Theclimatebet.com will continue to report monthly results on The Climate Bet, assuming that Mr. Gore took the bet. Professor Armstrong maintains that changes in temperature are natural variations that occur over time. He expects the scientific approach to forecasting will win in the long-run, though he realizes the 10 years of the bet may not be long enough. When he proposed the bet, simulations of temperature changes over the previous 157 years indicated that his chances of winning would be somewhat greater than 62%.

An article by Kesten Green, Scott Armstrong, and Willie Soon in the International Journal of Forecasting explains the reasons behind Professor Armstrong’s choice of the no-change model for forecasting global average temperatures. It is available here.

With November’s temperature anomaly at 0.12, the Global mean temperature was below the 2007 benchmark for The Climate Bet, and Armstrong’s forecast, for a second month running. See the graph updated with November data on the right.

After three months of cooling, the global mean temperature anomaly for October was lower than the Climate Bet benchmark 2007 average. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise.

The last three months have seen a revival of Mr Gore’s hopes of winning the notional Climate Bet, with global mean temperatures more than 0.3 degrees Centigrade warmer than the 30-year average. We’ve seen higher, and lower, temperatures before in the  course of the bet however and, with more than six years to run and with the actual temperature close to Armstrong’s forecast for 25 out of the 43 months to date, the bet is still very much alive.

After five months below the no-change forecast, temperatures have crossed the Al Gore forecast line. See the graph of actual temperature to June 2011 and the history of the bet with Scott Armstrong, to date, in the column on the right. Remember, you can click the graph to get a bigger image for closer inspection.

Global mean temperatures (more correctly, global mean temperature anomalies) for April and May 2011 have been added to our bet chart at top right. After three months at or below the 1981-2010 baseline, April and May were 0.12°C and 0.14°C above the baseline. Temperatures remained below the 2007 mean that Scott Armstrong offered to bet on, however, as they have done since the beginning of 2011. As a consequence, the errors to date from the forecasts that represent the pronouncements of Al Gore and the IPCC are in total 1.8% larger than those from the Armstrong forecasts.

As we have pointed out before, while Armstrong’s bet is based on evidence-based principles and Gore’s is not, 10 years is a short time period for bets about the climate and so the chance of a reversal are not much less than 50%.