The Global Warming Challenge

Adjustments to allow for a drifting satellite have found UAH temperatures to be flatter than previously estimated. As a consequence, Armstrong’s bet is safer than before. Gore’s forecast errors to date are 16% larger than the errors from Armstrong’s no-change forecast, and the no-change forecast of global mean temperatures has so far been more accurate than the Gore/IPCC forecast for 67% of the months covered by the bet. For the latest month (September 2012) and revised series, see the updated chart in the right column.

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.

The story of sea ice in the “other” Arctic, the Antarctic, seems to be largely untold. It turns out the extent of the Antarctic sea ice sheet has reached a record high. At least it is a record since satellite measurements began in 1979. Yes, I know, that is a short period and so not much of a record, but it is the same period that is used as the basis for Arctic sea ice record claims. Similarly, consistency requires that if one claims that Arctic ice has trended down then one must admit that Antarctic sea ice has trended up. For a chart of the time series and discussion on implications for temperatures, see the Real Science page 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.

Despite some excitement about locally high temperatures, in the U.S. in particular, the average global temperature anomaly is, so far this year, much the same as 2011′s at 0.16°C compared to 0.15°C. Compared to 2010, with an annual average anomaly of 0.41°C, most of the world is experiencing a relatively cool year.

Test your climate forecasting skills: It’s anonymous, and fun!

Go straight to the Quiz on the page here, make your forecasts for the two 25-year periods offline, then check the outcome and grade your response here.

To learn about the latest developments in climate forecasting, read the draft paper by Kesten Green, Scott Armstrong, and Willie Soon from the recent International Symposium on Forecasting in Boston (June 2012). The link to the paper is here, and supporting materials are towards the bottom of the page.

With a spell of some warmer than average weather over the last three months, the notional Al Gore’s bet on the IPCC’s .03C per annum warming forecast has been on the money for 23 out of 54 weeks. On the other hand, Scott Armstrong’s bet that temperatures would not change from the 2007 average in any predictable way has been on the money for the other 31 weeks, thus bettering the Gore hit rate by 35%.

In an article titled “Healthy polar bear count confounds doomsayers,” Paul Waldie in The Globe and Mail reported on 4 April…

“The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt. The Hudson Bay region, which straddles Nunavut and Manitoba, is critical because it’s considered a bellwether for how polar bears are doing elsewhere in the Arctic.”

This report will come as no surprise to followers of theclimatebet.com, where we prefer scientific forecasting to politically motivated alarmism. For a recap on scientific forecasting’s contribution to the polar bear population question, Scott Armstrong’s letter 2008 to Senator Barbara Boxer, who chaired a hearing on the issue, is here.

The 2008 paper on polar bear population forecasting, by Scott Armstrong, Kesten Green, and Willie Soon, is available here.

To see the rest of Paul Waldie’s report on the happy state of the polar bear population in 2012, see here.

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.