Articles Tagged "Scott Armstrong"

Abstract

The validity of the manmade global warming alarm requires the support of scientific forecasts of (1) a substantive long-term rise in global mean temperatures in the absence of regulations, (2) serious net harmful effects due to global warming, and (3) cost-effective regulations that would produce net beneficial effects versus alternatives policies, including doing nothing.

Without scientific forecasts for all three aspects of the alarm, there is no scientific basis to enact regulations. In effect, the warming alarm is like a three-legged stool: each leg needs to be strong. Despite repeated appeals to global warming alarmists, we have been unable to find scientific forecasts for any of the three legs.

We drew upon scientific (evidence-based) forecasting principles to audit the forecasting procedures used to forecast global mean temperatures by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC)—leg “1” of the stool. This audit found that the IPCC procedures violated 81% of the 89 relevant forecasting principles.

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The validity of the manmade global warming alarm requires the support of scientific forecasts of:

(1) a substantive long-term rise in global mean temperatures in the absence of regulations,

(2) serious net harmful effects due to global warming, and

(3) cost-effective regulations that would produce net beneficial effects versus alternatives such as doing nothing.

Without scientific forecasts for all three aspects of the alarm, there is no scientific basis to enact regulations. In effect, it is a three-legged stool.

Despite repeated appeals to global warming alarmists, we have been unable to find scientific forecasts for any of the three legs.

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Bjorn Lomborg ("Can Anything Serious Happen in Cancun?", op-ed, Nov. 12) claims that government spending on global warming policies is wasted, but he assumes that global warming caused by carbon dioxide is a fact. It is not. We base this statement not on the opinions of 31,000 American scientists who signed a public statement rejecting this warming hypothesis (the "Oregon Petition"), but rather because the forecasts of global warming were derived from faulty procedures.

We published a peer-reviewed paper showing that the forecasting procedures used by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change violated 72 of 89 relevant principles (e.g., "provide full disclosure of methods"). The IPCC has been unable to explain why it violated such principles. In response, we developed a model that follows the principles. Because the climate is complex and poorly understood, our model predicts that global average temperatures will not change.

In testing the models on global temperature data since 1850, we found that the long-range (91-to-100-years ahead) forecast errors from the IPCC's projection were 12 times larger than the errors from our simple model.

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'The forecasting procedures described in the IPCC 4th Assessment Report violated 81% of the 89 principles relevant to climate forecasting'

Comments on the United States Department of State's U.S. Climate Action Report 2010. 5th ed.

Statement

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 21st 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.