The Global Warming Challenge

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.

It is important to ensure the data and judgments that are the inputs to a forecasting process are adequate, valid, and unbiased. Christopher Monckton, in his speech at the Cambridge Union in 2007, provided a point-by-point audit of the inputs to the predictions made by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth. The speech, with question and answer session, is available on DVD from the Science and Public Policy Institute site.

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.

(more…)

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.

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

Although climate scientists have extensive climate knowledge and are aided by computer models, their long-term forecasts are essentially their judgments of what will happen in the decades to come. Unstructured judgments are used to determine the structure and much of the content of climate models. Unstructured judgments are also used to accept or reject model outputs.

Green and Armstrong (2007) found that climate modelers do not use evidence-based principles to forecast. In fact, they violate many principles of forecasting.

One solution to this problem is to combine what is known about forecasting methods with what climate scientists know. Knowledge about forecasting is provided at http://forecastingprinciples.com. In addition, the site lists many experts in forecasting methods who are available as consultants.

Click for the paper, “Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts“

Substantial revisions have been made in the paper thanks to additional peer review. The authors continue to work on further revisions and they seek further peer review, especially from those who might see shortcomings with the paper.

Scott Armstrong is still hopeful that Mr. Al Gore will join in the Global Warming Challenge to promote a scientific approach to forecasting climate change. Armstrong believes that they share many of the same objectives. Gore states in his latest book, The Assault On Reason:

“We must, for example, stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudostudies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public’s ability to discern the truth. Americans in both parties should insist on the reestablishment of respect for the rule of reason. The climate crisis, in particular, could cause us to reject and transcend ideologically based distortions of the best available scientific evidence.” p. 10

Gore, Al (2007). The Assault on Reason. New York: Penguin. ISBN 1594201226.