How would you respond?
The Gore camp responds. Click Continue Reading for Scott Armstrong’s response and additional correspondence.
Received Thursday, June 28, 2007:
Thank you for inviting Mr. Gore to Speak at the International Symposium on Forecasting yesterday. We are sorry that Mr. Gore was unable to attend. I hope that the event went well.
Sincerely,
Rachel VanCleave
info@CARTHAGEGROUP.COM
Sent July 5, 2007:
Dear Rachel VanCleave,
Thank you for your email of Thursday, June 28, 2007.
As indicated in my letter to Mr. Gore, I made the official announcement of my Global Warming Challenge on Wednesday, June 27th at the 27th Annual International Symposium on Forecasting.
I look forward to receiving Mr. Gore’s response. As stated, the terms of the Challenge are open to change.
The Challenge provides an opportunity for Mr. Gore to encourage the application of scientific methods to forecasting climate change. By combining scientific forecasting methods with knowledge about the climate, we can determine which policies will be in the public’s best interest. Mr. Gore’s participation would have enormous benefits in this push to identify the best policies.
Mr. Gore can find reader comments and media responses to the Global Warming Challenge at theclimatebet.com. There has been and continues to be considerable interest and discussion concerning the Challenge.
I would be pleased to send Mr. Gore a copy of my Principles of Forecasting book if you would send along the proper mailing address. The book provides empirical evidence underlying the forecasting principles used.
Scott Armstrong
Received July 6, 2007:
Due to demands on Mr. Gore’s time, he will be unable to take on ANY new projects at this time. Unfortunately he will be unable to participate in the Global Warming Challenge. Mr. Gore joins me in appreciation for your efforts and I wish you the best of luck with your efforts. Thank you for understanding and Thank you for thinking of Mr. Gore.
Sincerely,
Rachel VanCleave
Sent July 6, 2007:
Dear Rachel VanCleave,
Thank you for your email of July 6.
There must be a misunderstanding about my Global Warming Challenge. I designed it so that it would require only a few minutes of Mr. Gore’s time. He needs merely to nominate one of the many climate models that he has relied upon - or to ask someone on his staff to do so. All technical details can be worked out between his selected climate modelers and myself.
Mr. Gore continues to devote much time and energy to the problem of global warming. By spending only a few minutes (and donating $10,000 dollars to a charity), he can help to promote the use of scientific methods of forecasting, an area that is currently overlooked by climate modelers. This would add enormously to our efforts to obtain better policies in preparing for climate changes. The Global Warming Challenge fits with his goal of applying science to pubic policy.
You stated that Mr. Gore is quite busy currently. Please let me know when he would be able to spend a few minutes to take on the Global Warming Challenge.
Scott Armstrong
Received July 6, 2007:
I am regretting Mr. Gore’s participation on behalf of his communications director and his scheduler. Please understand that Mr. Gore is not taking on any new projects at this time. Thank you.
Sent July 6, 2007:
Dear Communications Director and Scheduler,
As noted previously, I understand that Mr. Gore is currently very busy.
Mr. Gore said we need to offer “genuinely meaningful solutions to the climate crisis.” The purpose of my email was to find out when he would have time. He could do enormous good for the scientific study of this problem by spending five minutes on the Global Warming Challenge, when time permits.
When might that be?
Scott Armstrong
Seems a ten year trend would be a 50:50 bet, even if the entire data set were used. Small signal in a noisy environment:
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2007/05/the_significance_of_5_year_tre.php
The professor seems to be confusing weather and climate. Nobody claims to be able to make ten year weather forecasts, anywhere.
He’s challenging whether any “global climate model” can make pinpoint ten year weather predictions. What part of “global” isn’t understood here?
He’s asking people to focus (for ten years) on only ten instruments, throwing out virtually all the information available, asking to bet only a tiny subset of the available information.
A very small signal will be lost in the annual variability. This is well known in climate history; see note 33 here: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/20ctrend.htm#N_33_
Only with a very large collection of data can a small signal be reliably detected in a noisy environment, as mentioned here for example:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/07/05/the-power-of-large-numbers/
As marketing this is very clever.
Ah, I see the climate scientist who’s been offering bets for years has already addressed this. He’s explained what I tried to, and far more clearly:
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-on-20000-bet.html
He write (my excerpt)
“, he is using the most obvious and trivial trick, that he appeared to have ruled out with his talk of forecasting climate change on this page. In fact, the terms of his challenge refer to forecasting annual mean temperatures at a handful of points, using raw model output. The trivial trick here is that of course the models do not directly represent local temperature (typical resolution is ~300km horizontally) and they also have significant regional biases, so meaningfully relating their output to local temperature requires at a minimum some sort of bias correction and/or downscaling. Such bias adjustment is an entirely routine procedure in many branches of forecasting, it is inconceivable that Armstrong does not realise this.
The other big problem is the time scale: the bet is for 1-10 year forecasts. While there are probably some people who can produce usable forecasts over at least the seasonal to annual time scale (and maybe further in some cases), on the whole these aren’t the same people as those doing 100 year projections. The GCMs used in the IPCC report don’t have any proper initialisation scheme that would enable them to make meaningful annual forecasts, and no-one has ever claimed that they do. From their point of view, whether one year is warmer than the last is basically a matter of chance, and a “persistence” forecast is a pretty reasonable reasonable choice.
A much fairer test of the models would be to look at something like a 20 year trend for global mean temperature (and possibly at a more regional scale: I haven’t looked in detail at this). Armstrong claims to be amenable to altering his terms: I’ve emailed him with these points and will report on his response. Based on what I have read, I’m not optimistic. It reads like a cheap publicity stunt rather than serious challenge.”
How will you respond?
This business professor knows how to make a challenge that is absolutely meaningless. It is absolutely a publicity stunt.
$10,000 might sound like a lot of money to the working schmo but on the scale of the bet is not much.
The real stunt by this huckster of a professor is that Gore loses either way.
If the efforts to abate global warming fail then Gore wins. But the scale is such that if nothing is done within a decade it will be too late. So we lose the world while Gore wins a trivial bet.
If the efforts succeed then Gore loses the bet.
This huckster wants Gore to bet that he will fail. Gore would have to want to fail to accept the bet!
Legitimate challenge? No way!
I am sufficiently generous to think the Armstrong challenge may be incompetent rather than illegitimate. I argue for the more generous position at
http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2007/07/b-schools-vs-scientists.html
It is perfectly possible to find people who will place substantial bets about things climate models actually say.
If people would like to make bets that the IPCC position is overstated then they will find takers, but only if they bet against things that the IPCC consensus position actually states.
Mr. Killian’s argument, however, is also wrong.
While what we do in the next few years will greatly affect whether the final outcome is disastrous, they will have little effect over the next ten years climate trajectory. For good or ill, it has taken a century to get on this path and it will take decades of effort to get off it.
Whether or not we adopt a serious climate change policy, the science unfortunately indicates that it will have little impact on the climate for some considerable time.