The Global Warming Challenge

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)

The U. S. government commissioned studies to support the listing of polar bears as a threatened or endangered species. Polar bear numbers are currently high and the population has been increasing rapidly in recent decades. Everyone likes polar bears, so this is good news. A decision to list would require forecasts that the current upward population trend will reverse. The government studies concluded that polar bear populations would decrease substantially.

Decision makers and the public should expect people who make forecasts to be familiar with the scientific principles of forecasting just as a patient expects his physician to be familiar with the procedures dictated by medical science. Three scientists, J. Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania, Kesten Green of Monash University, and Willie Soon of The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, audited the government studies to assess whether they were consistent with forecasting principles. Their paper, “Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public-Policy Forecasting Audit,” has been accepted for publication in the management science journal Interfaces. It is the only peer-reviewed paper on polar bear population forecasting that has been accepted for publication in an academic journal.

They concluded that the government forecasts were based on false assumptions and their polar bear population forecasts contravened many principles for scientific forecasting. Indeed, the reports followed fewer than one-sixth of the relevant principles. Given the importance of the forecasts, all principles should be properly applied. In short, the government reports do not provide relevant information for this decision.

Research shows that for issues such as the population of polar bears—situations that are complex and where there is much uncertainty—the best forecast is that things will follow a “random walk;” in effect, this model states that the most recent value is the best forecast for all periods in the future. Because the polar bear population has been increasing over recent decades, however, a continuation of that trend over the short term is possible.

Copies of Armstrong, Green and Soon’s forthcoming paper are available at http://publicpolicyforecasting.com.

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.

Kesten Green is giving a talk titled “Scientific Forecasting of Climate Change” at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, which is being held in New York City Marriott Marquis Times Square hotel from March 2 to 4. Sponsored by the Heartland Institute.

Global Warming: Crisis or Scam?

The debate over whether human activity is responsible for some or all of the modern warming, and then what to do if our presence on Earth is indeed affecting the global climate, has enormous consequences for everyone in virtually all parts of the globe. Proposals to drive down human greenhouse gas emissions by raising energy costs or imposing draconian caps could dramatically affect the quality of life of people in developed countries, and, due to globalization, the lives of people in less-developed countries too.

The global warming debate that the public and policymakers usually see is one-sided, dominated by government scientists and government organizations agenda-driven to find data that suggest a human impact on climate and to call for immediate government action, if only to fund their own continued research, but often to achieve political agendas entirely unrelated to the science of climate change. There is another side, but in recent years it has been denied a platform from which to speak.

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change promises to be an exciting event and the point of departure for future conferences, publications, and educational campaigns to present both sides of this important topic.

On January 30, 2008, Scott Armstrong gave a talk presenting his findings to the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works’ “Examining Threats and Protections for the Polar Bear”. Click here for full text of the talk. The following are selected excerpts. Full text is available of the paper “Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public Policy Forecasting Audit” by Armstrong, Green, and Soon.

We conducted forecasting audits of two of the nine administrative reports that were prepared in 2007 to “…Support U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Polar Bear Listing Decision.” We selected the reports Amstrup et al. and Hunter et al. as they appeared to be the primary forecasting documents. Our concern was to establish whether the reports’ forecasts of the polar bear population over the balance of the 21st Century were the product of scientific procedures.
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By TOM KIZZIA (tkizzia@adn.com)

The following are some excerpts from the article discussing Alaska’s decision whether to list polar bears as endangered or not. Click here for the full text available online.

Ken Taylor has had easier jobs than this one. It’s not like the good old days chasing rhinos, climbing into bear dens and wrestling beluga whales in shallow water.

These days, sitting at a desk as deputy commissioner of fish and game, the veteran wildlife biologist has to muster the best science he can find to argue that Alaska’s polar bears are in good shape and need no special protection from hypothetical doomsday scenarios.

This requires Taylor to stand up to the prevailing wisdom about global warming in most of the world’s scientific community and the public — not to mention some pretty strong opinions in his own department.

But Taylor, the Palin administration’s point man on polar bears, argues that the scientific justification simply isn’t there — at least not yet — to declare the polar bear “threatened” and touch off a cascade of effects under the Endangered Species Act. A decision on the bears is expected from the U.S. Department of the Interior in the next few weeks.

“From my perspective, it’s very difficult to put a population on the list that’s healthy, based on a projection 45 years into the future,” Taylor says. “That’s really stretching scientific credibility.”

…

The state also pokes at studies used to predict the future of polar ice, quoting at length from the climate scientists’ own demurrals about margins of error. The chain of predicted problems following from those studies are based on “unsupported conjecture,” the state says.

The state’s critique was based on the work of a consultant, J. Scott Armstrong, a University of Pennsylvania expert on mathematical forecasting who has elsewhere challenged former vice president Al Gore to a $10,000 bet on whether the globe is truly warming.

Scott Armstrong and Kesten Green are two of the over 400 prominent scientists featured in a Senate Report debunking the scientific “consensus” on global warming. The report was released December 20th, 2007, and can be accessed at the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works site. The following is a selected excerpt citing Armstrong’s climate challenge to Al Gore, scientific forecasts versus forecasts by scientists, and the recent study of polar bear prediction methodology.

Internationally known forecasting pioneer Dr. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania and his colleague Kesten Green of Monash University in Australia challenged Gore to a $10,000 bet in June 2007 over the accuracy of climate computer models predictions. “Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder.” According to Armstrong, the author of Long-Range Forecasting, the most frequently cited book on forecasting methods, “Of 89 principles [of forecasting], the [UN] IPCC violated 72.” Armstrong and Green also critiqued the Associated Press for hyping climate fears in 2007. “Dire consequences have been predicted to arise from warming of the Earth in coming decades of the 21st century. Enormous sea level rise is one of the more dramatic forecasts. According to the AP’s Borenstein, such sea-level forecasts were experts’ judgments on what will happen,” Armstrong and Green wrote to EPW on September 23, 2007.

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A forecasting audit conducted by Scott Armstrong, Kesten Green and Willie Soon has concluded that the government’s administrative reports do not rely on scientific forecasting procedures. Thus, it would be irresponsible to classify polar bears as an endangered species. The authors are seeking additional peer review for their paper.

Paul Georgia on National Review Online concludes with a reference to the Green and Armstrong (2007) paper in his article “Speculation Elimination,” critiquing the press’s emphasis on the Bush administration’s “censoring” of science.

The claim that the Bush Administration censored science is without merit. What it seems to have done, is cut the portions of the testimony that were based in expert speculation about the future. According to the scientific literature on forecasting, expert opinion is the least reliable source for accurate predictions.

A new paper by Professors Scott Armstrong and Kesten Green, leading experts on forecasting, argues that “Comparative empirical studies have routinely concluded that judgmental forecasting by experts [rather than scientific forecasting] is the least accurate of the methods available to make forecasts.” They also show that, “Agreement among experts is weakly related to accuracy,” when it comes to forecasting.

The media storyline is backwards. Rather than censoring science, the Bush Administration responsibly removed baseless speculation from the CDC’s testimony. If the purpose of congressional hearings is “fact finding,” then such speculation is inappropriate and the Administration acted appropriately.

Paul Georgia is the executive director of the Center for Science and Public Policy. The article was adapted from a paper published by the Center.

Dire consequences have been predicted to arise from the warming of the Earth in coming decades of the 21st Century. Enormous rises in sea level represent one of the more dramatic forecasts. A recent article provided sea-level forecasts based on experts’ judgments of what will happen. These judgments are in turn based on experts’ predictions of global warming. The article made no reference to scientific forecasts. As shown in Green and Armstrong (2007) experts’ forecasts have no validity in situations characterized by high complexity, high uncertainty, and poor feedback. Numerous other scientists also criticized this approach.

To date we are unaware of any forecasts of sea levels that adhere to proper (scientific) forecasting methodology and our quick search on Google Scholar came up short. If such forecasts are available, please provide citations and support as to their validity. As a first step, it would be useful to summarize studies that extrapolate long-term trends; this summary could provide a benchmark for comparison with other studies.

We will provide free access to them at publicpolicyforecasting.com and request commentary at theclimatebet.com. Media outlets should be clear when they are reporting on scientific work and when they are reporting on the opinions held by some scientists. Without scientific support for their forecasting methods, the concerns of scientists should not be used as a basis for public policy.

Kesten Green and Scott Armstrong