Archive for October, 2009
Al Gore’s forecasts perform poorly compared to assuming temperatures won’t change
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.
Will unscientific climate forecasts lead to a powerful and unelected World Government?
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.
Climate science made easy: Please include this child’s lesson on the urban heat island effect in your next movie, Mr. Gore
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″.
Results to September ’09: A warm month but no cigar for Gore
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.
