The Global Warming Challenge

Yes, Virginia, there is a polar bear
Margaret Wente
Friday, February 01

Every eight-year-old knows the polar bears are drowning. “I feel sad for them,” said one friend’s kid the other day as he bundled up for school. Maybe he’d seen those TV ads featuring adorable baby bears with voiceovers by appealing children. “The ice is melting because of global warming,” lisps a little girl over pictures of polar bears apparently swimming for their lives. “Baby bears have died. Please help them.”

No one wants the polar bears to die. Obviously the grownups should do something – and so they are. A host of scientists, environmentalists, legislators and worried citizens is pressuring the U.S. government to add polar bears to the list of endangered species. A decision is expected soon, and they’ve got an impressive array of studies to back them up. One study forecasts that the melting of the Arctic sea ice could kill off two-thirds of the polar bear population by 2050 by destroying their habitat.

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Below are excerpts from the Q&A session between Armstrong and Senator Inhofe. Full Text of Examining Threats and Protections For the Polar Bear.

Dr. Armstrong, when you were talking, this chart up here, first of all, did you say that you had a paper that you wrote in 1978?

Mr. Armstrong. I was writing books on long range forecasting then.

Senator Inhofe. You were writing books in 1978?

Mr. Armstrong. Well, I have been in this field for 48 years now.

Senator Inhofe. Wow. I thought maybe I heard wrong. You are the forecasting expert, I recognize that.

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Below is Armstrong’s testimony from YouTube; it is approximately 6 minutes in length. Before you watch the video, please take this brief poll. Based on the image, what do you think will be the trend for the rest of the 21st century? Then, after watching the video, click to see Exhibit 3 found at the end of this post to see how Hunter et. al came to their conclusions.

I think the trend will be:
1) sharply upward
2) upward
3) slightly upward
4) hard to say
5) slightly downward
6) downward
7) sharply downward

View Results

Click here to see Exhibit 3. It shows the data used to estimate the key relationship.

Decimation of the polar bear: bearfaced lies?
A leading expert in forecasting tells spiked that research into the impact of climate change on polar bears has been shockingly shoddy.
Tim Black

Despite the steady growth of the polar bear population over the past 40 years - it now stands between 20,000 and 25,000 - there is no shortage of doom-laden reports about the bears’ imminent demise on our warming planet. Some refer to polar bears as the ‘canaries of climate change’. Indeed, so strong is the misery-mongering about polar bears that the US is currently trying to list them as an endangered species; and its campaign has been aided and abetted by several pieces of US government-sponsored research into polar bear numbers. Yet according to experts in the field of forecasting methods, official rumours of the polar bear’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

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We plan to add video footage of the Q&A, which includes some interesting exchanges between Senator Boxer and Professor Armstrong (or “Professor Scott” as she preferred to call him). Stay tuned for updates.

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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Retired physicist Roger Cohen offers a public wager of $5,000 that the Earth will be cooler in 10 years, setting Feb. 9th as the deadline for individuals to take him up on the challenge; he cites Armstrong’s $10,000 challenge to Gore as inspiration. Click here for Durango Herald’s full article.

Below are details of the challenge from Roger Cohen:

Herald readers have had the opportunity to discern the flimsiness of the climate catastrophe case and to witness catastrophe advocates’ anger against those who disagree and their reluctance to debate technical issues. If advocates remain confident of impending climate catastrophe and firm in their belief that worldwide government interventions are urgently needed, they will seize the opportunity I offer here.

• I offer a public wager of $5,000 that the Earth will be cooler in 10 years.
• The wager is open to one individual or group of individuals. If more than one individual or group is interested, I will choose one and notify the others.
• The determining metric will be simple: whether the global average temperature for the year 2017 is higher or lower than 2007, as determined by the authoritative “HadCRUT3″ data set (Climatic Research Unit, U.K.), or its successor.
• Funds will be deposited in an escrow account. Interest earned will be paid to the escrow agent.
• There will be a simple written agreement between the parties (I will pay legal counsel to prepare), and the parties will sign an escrow agreement relating to the deposited funds.
• My winnings will be donated to a local charitable organization promoting science education.

The wager is aimed at focusing attention on the critical issue: future climate and our ability to predict it. The United Nation’s climate panel relies on computer models for its projections and predicts that the Earth will likely be warmer in 10 years. The wager involves actual global climate data - no computer predictions, cherry-picked anecdotes, appeals to “majority opinion,” distortions of fact, or unfounded proclamations.

No excuses. If the amount is too high, advocates can run a fundraiser. If it seems low, propose a different amount. Want a different data set? Propose one. Trying to divert attention to those “nasty energy companies” and similar smokescreens will only emphasize the weakness of your position.

Parties should respond by mail - P.O. Box 3162, Durango 81302 - within 20 days of this publication. If no one responds by that time, there will be no wager.

Roger W. Cohen, Durango

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.”

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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.