The Global Warming Challenge

Solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev, of the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics of the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, believe the climate is driven by the sun and predict global cooling will soon occur. The two scientists are so convinced that global temperatures will cool within the next decade they have placed a $10,000 wager with a UK scientist to prove their certainty. The criteria for the $10,000 bet will be to “compare global temperatures between 1998 and 2003 with those between 2012 and 2017. The loser will pay up in 2018,” according to an April 16, 2007 article in Live Science.

Dr. Art Robinson’s Petition Project (Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine) lists over 31,000 scientists that have signed, rejecting claims of human-caused global warming. 9,021 of the scientists hold PhDs. Covered on May 16, 2008 in the National Post, “32,000 deniers“, by Lawrence Solomon features the history of the Kyoto Protocol and the Petition Project’s objective:

“E-mails started coming in every day,” he explained. “And they kept coming. “ The writers were outraged at the way Al Gore and company were abusing the science to their own ends. “We decided to do the survey again.”
Using a subset of the mailing list of American Men and Women of Science, a who’s who of Science, Robinson mailed out his solicitations through the postal service, requesting signed petitions of those who agreed that Kyoto was a danger to humanity. The response rate was extraordinary, “much, much higher than anyone expected, much higher than you’d ordinarily expect,” he explained. He’s processed more than 31,000 at this point, more than 9,000 of them with PhDs, and has another 1,000 or so to go — most of them are already posted on a Web site at petitionproject.org.
Why go to this immense effort all over again, when the press might well ignore the tens of thousands of scientists who are standing up against global warming alarmism?
“I hope the general public will become aware that there is no consensus on global warming,” he says, “and I hope that scientists who have been reluctant to speak up will now do so, knowing that they aren’t alone.”
At one level, Robinson, a PhD scientist himself, recoils at his petition. Science shouldn’t be done by poll, he explains. “The numbers shouldn’t matter. But if they want warm bodies, we have them.”

To read the full text of the petition and more about the project, please visit the Petition Project website. The site also includes the list of signers.

Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced on May 14, 2008 that he is accepting the recommendation of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The listing is based on the best available science, which shows that loss of sea ice threatens and will likely continue to threaten polar bear habitat. This loss of habitat puts polar bears at risk of becoming endangered in the foreseeable futures”. See the U.S. Department of the Interior website for the full announcement.

This extraordinary announcement is at odds with evidence that the polar bear population is currently thriving, and is based on false assumptions and unscientific forecasting procedures. The forthcoming Interfaces paper by Armstrong, Green, and Soon, provides evidence that the “best available science” does not support a listing.

Green and Armstrong’s paper “Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts,” found that the IPCC reached its conclusions about global warming despite the lack of a single scientific forecast. How could scientists do this? Tim Ball, an eminent climatologist, explains that the IPCC process was political rather than scientific in his article “How UN structures were designed to prove human CO2 was causing global warming.” An excerpt is available below.

The IPCC is a political organization and yet it is the sole basis of the claim of a scientific consensus on climate change. Consensus is neither a scientific fact nor important in science, but it is very important in politics. There are 2500 members in the IPCC divided between 600 in Working Group I (WGI), who examine the actual climate science, and 1900 in working Groups II and III (WG II and III), who study “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” and “Mitigation of Climate Change” respectively…They accept without question the findings of WGI and assume warming due to humans is a certainty. In a circular argument typical of so much climate politics the work of the 1900 is listed as ‘proof’ of human caused global warming. Through this they established the IPCC as the only credible authority thus further isolating those who raised questions.

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The Competitive Enterprise Institute presented three videos by climate and forecasting specialists. Among the three are: Dr. Joseph D’Aleo, a former meteorology professor at Lyndon State College in Vermont and the first director of meteorology at The Weather Channel; Dr. Kesten Green, of the Business and Economics Forecasting Unit at Australia’s Monash University, and: Dr. Jim O’Brien, State Climatologist of Florida and director of the Center for Ocean Atmospheric Prediction Studies.

All three videos are available at GlobalWarming.Org. Kesten Green, adviser to this website, is featured below.

Kesten Green claims that the IPCC climate models incorporate just 15% of the principles and procedures appropriate to scientific forecasting. Many IPCC scientists seem to be unaware of forecasting methodology as a scientific discipline, he adds. Instead, the Monash University specialist charges that the models’ elaborate mathematical formulas reflect the IPCC staff’s own opinions at both the input and output stages.

One senior scientist and author with the IPCC ducks the charge of unscientific methodology, according to Green, by saying the UN climate models do not constitute forecasts or predictions. However, the specific words “forecast” and “prediction” reoccur many times in IPCC reports and they’re viewed that way by the public. If the IPCC in fact hasn’t made scientific forecasts, the Australian queries, what reason is there to be worried about climate change at all?

(From DOB Magazine Online)

April 15, 2008

J. Scott Armstrong

I have been working on a book on persuasion for the past 14 years. Having reviewed the evidence, I concluded that rational arguments are not effective in leading people to change strongly held opinions—especially not in the short term. This intransigence is a problem, because if peoples’ opinions are at odds with the facts, they are likely to act and vote in ways that cause harm to themselves and others.

There is a solution, however, and that is to persuade oneself. In other words, in order to reduce the risk of making bad decisions each of us should identify what information would, if it existed, lead us to change our opinion about important issues—such as whether humanity is faced with a problem of dangerous manmade global warming.

My own self-persuasion journey on the topic of global warming started more than a year ago. Needing a featured talk for the International Symposium on Forecasting in June 2007, I discussed possible topics with Kesten Green. We concluded that global warming was an important issue that hinged on long-term forecasts. As it happened, Kevin Trenberth, an IPCC lead author, was a keynote speaker at the symposium. I sent him a cordial note and asked him if he would share his slides with me prior to the conference. He said “no.” This experience was repeated in my contacts with other people who warn of dangerous global warming. When I have asked for evidence, data, or published papers to support their position (such as the statement that all scientists agree that global warming will occur in the future), I have typically received either no reply or a refusal. Such behavior is strange for scientists. In contrast, global warming skeptics have been anxious to make their papers and the data available.

My review of the evidence led me to become a skeptic. Indeed, we were unable to find a single scientific forecast of global warming despite contacting over one hundred global warming advocates directly, and also issuing our request in talks, on email lists, and on web sites. We kept the global warming advocates informed of our research and asked them for suggestions and peer review. In return we received mostly silence although there were some nasty comments and some people who asked that they be removed from our mailing list.

My conclusion is that the scientific evidence clearly favors the skeptics’ position. In addition, I believe that the global warming advocates have violated many of the tenets of the scientific method; the global warming advocates say that it happens on both sides, but that has not been my observation.

So I have made a decision based on the evidence that I needed to convince me. In addition, in our papers, we have also described the information that would change our minds yet again—in effect, proper forecasts would convince us. We are hoping to do some of this forecasting ourselves, but it is costly and so far we have not obtained funding. Our two papers to date (available at http://publicpolicyforecasting.com) have been written with no funding.

The problem is essentially a forecasting problem. Those who are forecasting global warming have demonstrated little knowledge of how to forecast. This is unfortunate as there have been many useful (and often surprising) findings from the research on forecasting that have been published, especially over the past half century. Moreover, global warming advocates tend to become upset when the research findings are pointed out and they claim that different principles apply to them. We have replied by asking them to tell us which principles differ and to provide the evidence for their assertions. They seldom reply, and when they do, they do not provide evidence; at least, not yet.

The extended due date for the Global Warming Challenge passed with no word from Mr. Gore. Although he and Professor Armstrong have had a number of communications, Mr. Gore offered no response to the key question:

“When and under what conditions would you be willing to engage in a scientific test of your forecasts?”

Validation of forecasting methods is a key issue in climate change because, although we know that climate varies, we have been unable to locate a single scientific forecast that supports global warming. If Mr. Gore or anyone else is aware of such a forecast, they should reveal the source to the scientific community. Claims that science supports global warming forecasts have, to date, failed to provide sources.

A history of the Global Warning Challenge is provided at http://theclimatebet.com. It includes all correspondence between Scott Armstrong and Al Gore. The site will post all papers that purport to provide scientific forecasts of global warming. The papers must provide full disclosure on how the forecasts were made, as full disclosure is one of the basic principles of science.

Scott Armstrong’s letter to Al Gore follows:

March 28, 2008
Honorable Albert Gore
2100 West End Avenue,
Suite 620
Nashville, TN 37203
Fax: 615-327-2227

Dear Mr. Gore,

The extended deadline for the Global Warming Challenge has passed and, despite the fact that I have responded to all of your concerns to date regarding the challenge, you have not been willing to engage in a scientific test of your forecasts of dangerous global warming.

Despite our literature searches and our appeals both on the Internet and in our published paper on climate change, my colleague and I have been unable to find a single scientific forecast to support global warming. If you are aware of such a study, I appeal to you directly to reveal it to the scientific community so that it can be subject to peer review and so the public can see the scientific basis for your claims.

In addition we need to continue scientific studies. Thus, I pose this question:

“When and under what conditions would you be willing to engage in a scientific test of your global warming forecasts?”

I look forward to your responses. By your own words, the global warming issue remains an important one for the future of the world. Given the enormous expenditures on this issue, I hope that as a concerned and influential citizen, you will take an active role in encouraging the application of science to this issue.

Sincerely,

J. Scott Armstrong

Armstrong’s AEI talk titled Strengths and Weaknesses of Climate Models on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 is available at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research website in both audio and video format.

Other attendees included: Daniel Botkin, a research professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Orrin Pilkey, the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Geology at Duke University; Jim Manzi, CEO of Applied Predictive Technologies; Stephen F. Hayward, AEI’s F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow; and Kenneth P. Green, a resident scholar at AEI.

Track 2: Climatology (4:00-5:30pm)

Kesten C. Green, Ph.D.
Senior Research Fellow
Business and Economic Forecasting Unit
Monash University, Australia
Scientific Forecasting and Climate Change

In connection with J. Scott Armstrong’s earlier talk on polar bear population forecasting, Kesten Green focused broadly on the scientific forecasting of climate change, and the forecasting principles that should be applied to better forecasts. As shown in the audit of Chapter 8 of the 2007 IPCC report, the work repeatedly “contravenes” key forecasting principles that have been established over 70 years of forecasting work shown to improve forecasting. Perhaps the overarching principle as applied to climate change is that one should be conservative when uncertainty is high, or choose to the naïve no-change model as Armstrong has done in his Global Warming Challenge. Public policy should be based on scientific forecasting, and Green referred to Monckton’s words “we should have the courage to do nothing.”

Anthony Watts
Chief Meteorologist, KPAY-AM Radio
Founder, SurfaceStations.org
A Hands-On Study of Station Siting and Data Quality Issues for the United States Historical Climatology Network

Anthony Watts introduced to the audience his work on documenting the inconsistencies of surface stations across the United States and the world – the same surface stations that measure local temperature. A wide variety of issues plague these surface stations, from the changing of paint used to coat the outside, to surface stations being placed on roofs, near sewage treatment plants, next to cars and air conditioners. Only 12% of these surface stations recorded so far have been placed in areas that meet all the guidelines. With nearly half of all the surface stations already documented and listed on the site surfacestations.org, the data from Watts’ work certainly puts the very measurement method under question.

Track 4: Climate Change Economics (2:15-3:45pm)

Thomas Tanton
Fellow in Environmental Studies
Pacific Research Institute
Lessons Learned from the California Experience

Tanton began this track with an overview of the history and warning of the future of California, and the implication its policies have on the rest of the United States. The state has implemented a wide variety of policies, from the Pavley Bill setting emissions standards and MPG requirements, to low carbon fuel standards, all of which force a burden on consumers and the economy. The push for less carbon in fuel means at least 5 million gallons of “something else” – undoubtedly the inefficient production of biofuel. Estimates of California’s climate policy reveals that Assembly Bill 32 will be a $512 billion hit to the economy. All of this despite California having the 8^th lowest per capita gasoline consumption across the fifty states.

Roy Innis
National Chairman and CEO
Congress of Racial Equality
Defending Civil Rights: Proposed Climate Change Prevention Laws Would Roll Back Civil Rights Progress

Ann McElhinney
Director and Producer
Not Evil, Just Wrong
The Real Politics Behind Global Warming: The Redistribution of Wealth

Roy Innis, civil rights leader, and Anne McElhinney gave passionate pleas for the economic civil rights that global warming policies too often ignore. The media monopoly combined with the “American people who want to do the right thing” have cloaked the debate over global warming as a moral one. Innis pointed to our three presidential candidate nominees and said “Barack wants change, but not this kind of change.” He recognized that the implementation of global warming policies weighs down disproportionately on the poor of America, shown by the doubling of corn prices due to biofuel in recent years, as well as the poor of the world. Both Innis and Anne pointed to the “green lunacy” of the 1970s that caused the DDT ban, and this particular effect on sub-Saharan Africa: 60 million preventable malaria deaths since the ban in 1972. Since then, in 2006 the World Health Organization completely reversed its prior view of the pesticide, saying it is okay to use the pesticide even for indoor spraying. It has also been shown that bald eagle populations were seriously affected by hunting and human encroachment of territory, rather than DDT.

Innis described going to film a documentary in Uganda, where the government is not allowed to use DDT because Europeans refuse to provide support to the country otherwise. He spoke to a woman whose child was in a coma due to malaria and explained to her the DDT story, and she replied “but DDT is bad for the environment.”