Forecasting Guru Announces: "no scientific basis for forecasting climate"

It has been an interesting couple of days. Today yet another scientist has come forward with a press release saying that not only did their audit of IPCC forecasting procedures and found that they “violated 72 scientific principles of forecasting”, but that “The models were not intended as forecasting models and they have not been validated for that purpose.” This organization should know, they certify forecasters for many disciplines and in conjunction with John Hopkins University if Washington, DC, offer a Certificate of Forecasting Practice. The story below originally appeared in the blog of Australian Dr. Jennifer Marohasy. It is reprinted below, with with some pictures and links added for WUWT readers. – Anthony

j-scott-armstrong iif-website

J. Scott Armstrong, founder of the International Journal of Forecasting

Guest post by Jennifer Marohasy

YESTERDAY, a former chief at NASA, Dr John S. Theon, slammed the computer models used to determine future climate claiming they are not scientific in part because the modellers have “resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists”. [1]

Today, a founder of the International Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Forecasting, International Institute of Forecasters, and International Symposium on Forecasting, and the author of Long-range Forecasting (1978, 1985), the Principles of Forecasting Handbook, and over 70 papers on forecasting, Dr J. Scott Armstrong, tabled a statement declaring that the forecasting process used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lacks a scientific basis. [2]

What these two authorities, Drs Theon and Armstrong, are independently and explicitly stating is that the computer models underpinning the work of many scientific institutions concerned with global warming, including Australia’s CSIRO, are fundamentally flawed.

In today’s statement, made with economist Kesten Green, Dr Armstrong provides the following eight reasons as to why the current IPCC computer models lack a scientific basis:

1. No scientific forecasts of the changes in the Earth’s climate.

Currently, the only forecasts are those based on the opinions of some scientists. Computer modeling was used to create scenarios (i.e., stories) to represent the scientists’ opinions about what might happen. The models were not intended as forecasting models (Trenberth 2007) and they have not been validated for that purpose. Since the publication of our paper, no one has provided evidence to refute our claim that there are no scientific forecasts to support global warming.

We conducted an audit of the procedures described in the IPCC report and found that they clearly violated 72 scientific principles of forecasting (Green and Armstrong 2008). (No justification was provided for any of these violations.) For important forecasts, we can see no reason why any principle should be violated. We draw analogies to flying an aircraft or building a bridge or performing heart surgery—given the potential cost of errors, it is not permissible to violate principles.

2. Improper peer review process.

To our knowledge, papers claiming to forecast global warming have not been subject to peer review by experts in scientific forecasting.

3. Complexity and uncertainty of climate render expert opinions invalid for forecasting.

Expert opinions are an inappropriate forecasting method in situations that involve high complexity and high uncertainty. This conclusion is based on over eight decades of research. Armstrong (1978) provided a review of the evidence and this was supported by Tetlock’s (2005) study that involved 82,361 forecasts by 284 experts over two decades.

Long-term climate changes are highly complex due to the many factors that affect climate and to their interactions. Uncertainty about long-term climate changes is high due to a lack of good knowledge about such things as:

a) causes of climate change,

b) direction, lag time, and effect size of causal factors related to climate change,

c) effects of changing temperatures, and

d) costs and benefits of alternative actions to deal with climate changes (e.g., CO2 markets).

Given these conditions, expert opinions are not appropriate for long-term climate predictions.

4. Forecasts are needed for the effects of climate change.

Even if it were possible to forecast climate changes, it would still be necessary to forecast the effects of climate changes. In other words, in what ways might the effects be beneficial or harmful? Here again, we have been unable to find any scientific forecasts—as opposed to speculation—despite our appeals for such studies.

We addressed this issue with respect to studies involving the possible classification of polar bears as threatened or endangered (Armstrong, Green, and Soon 2008). In our audits of two key papers to support the polar bear listing, 41 principles were clearly violated by the authors of one paper and 61 by the authors of the other. It is not proper from a scientific or from a practical viewpoint to violate any principles. Again, there was no sign that the forecasters realized that they were making mistakes.

5. Forecasts are needed of the costs and benefits of alternative actions that might be taken to combat climate change.

Assuming that climate change could be accurately forecast, it would be necessary to forecast the costs and benefits of actions taken to reduce harmful effects, and to compare the net benefit with other feasible policies including taking no action. Here again we have been unable to find any scientific forecasts despite our appeals for such studies.

6.  To justify using a climate forecasting model, one would need to test it against a relevant naïve model.

We used the Forecasting Method Selection Tree to help determine which method is most appropriate for forecasting long-term climate change. A copy of the Tree is attached as Appendix 1. It is drawn from comparative empirical studies from all areas of forecasting. It suggests that extrapolation is appropriate, and we chose a naïve (no change) model as an appropriate benchmark. A forecasting model should not be used unless it can be shown to provide forecasts that are more accurate than those from this naïve model, as it would otherwise increase error. In Green, Armstrong and Soon (2008), we show that the mean absolute error of 108 naïve forecasts for 50 years in the future was 0.24°C.

7. The climate system is stable.

To assess stability, we examined the errors from naïve forecasts for up to 100 years into the future. Using the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre’s data, we started with 1850 and used that year’s average temperature as our forecast for the next 100 years. We then calculated the errors for each forecast horizon from 1 to 100. We repeated the process using the average temperature in 1851 as our naïve forecast for the next 100 years, and so on. This “successive updating” continued until year 2006, when we forecasted a single year ahead. This provided 157 one-year-ahead forecasts, 156 two-year-ahead and so on to 58 100-year-ahead forecasts.

We then examined how many forecasts were further than 0.5°C from the observed value. Fewer than 13% of forecasts of up to 65-years-ahead had absolute errors larger than 0.5°C. For longer horizons, fewer than 33% had absolute errors larger than 0.5°C. Given the remarkable stability of global mean temperature, it is unlikely that there would be any practical benefits from a forecasting method that provided more accurate forecasts.

8.  Be conservative and avoid the precautionary principle.

One of the primary scientific principles in forecasting is to be conservative in the darkness of uncertainty. This principle also argues for the use of the naive no-change extrapolation. Some have argued for the precautionary principle as a way to be conservative. It is a political, not a scientific principle. As we explain in our essay in Appendix 2, it is actually an anti-scientific principle in that it attempts to make decisions without using rational analyses. Instead, cost/benefit analyses are appropriate given the available evidence which suggests that temperature is just as likely to go up as down. However, these analyses should be supported by scientific forecasts.

The reach of these models is extraordinary, for example, the CSIRO models are currently being used in Australia to determine water allocations for farmers and to justify the need for an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) – the most far-reaching of possible economic interventions.   Yet, according to Dr Armstrong, these same models violate 72 scientific principles.

********************

1. Marc Morano, James Hansen’s Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic, January 27,2009. http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=1a5e6e32-802a-23ad-40ed-ecd53cd3d320

2. “Analysis of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for Greenhouse Gases”, Drs. J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten C. Green a statement prepared for US Senator Inhofe for an analysis of the US EPA’s proposed policies for greenhouse gases.  http://theclimatebet.com


Sponsored IT training links:

Get guaranteed success in 312-50 exam in first try using incredible 642-374 dumps and other 310-200 training resources prepared by experts.


The climate data they don't want you to find — free, to your inbox.
Join readers who get 5–8 new articles daily — no algorithms, no shadow bans.
0 0 votes
Article Rating
335 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
John Philip
January 29, 2009 5:21 am

1. Deja vu. I am all in favour of recycling, but …..
2> … You can download GISS’s climate model at their website.
REPLY: But getting it to run is a different task altogether. Have you run it? Mind you, not the “educational” version for public consumption with the nice front end GUI, but the one GISS released last year, FORTRAN warts and all, after much public pressure following the 2007 Y2K temperature splice debacle? If you’ve been able to get that one to work, we’d love to see some output here. – Anthony

You seem to be confusing the GISTEMP gridded global mean temperature product with the ModelE climate model source code . ModelE will happily run on any unix system that has a FORTRAN compiler and some other (public domain) math modules. Here is a forum for people who have no trouble doing just that.
Looking at actual source code can be informative, however it is frequently better to take the algorithms e.g. for adjustment (which have always been public domain, in the case of GISTEMP) and develop your own software independently to verify results.
REPLY: No I wasn’t talking about GISTEMP, though it hasn’t been successfully run in the wild AFAIK. EDGCM (in the forum you refer to) is the educational version with the GUI, I have it, it is not the same version (as I understand it) as the GISS model E they run in-house. Even for the Model E without the GUI front end, it seems they still haven’t matched the public version with the in-house version. For example this comment on that forum from Gavin Schmidt:

“We welcome feedback on ease of use, compile/runtime problems and indeed climate model results. Do note however, that ongoing development means that some issues have already been resolved in current codes. We intend to update the public code some point soon at which point, public comments will be even more welcome. “

There’s nothing additional from Gavin past that one post he made, and why does he refer to “public code” separately from “current codes” then provide no updates to that forum comment for almost two years now? – Anthony

January 29, 2009 5:23 am

Brendan H,
“Theon just comes across as a grouchy old git”
Thank you very much for your careful and expert analysis.
This is typical of the offensive, ad hominem, ageist attacks employed by the warmists.
In return, I would like to offer you ‘some sincere advice’. Read what Theon and Armstrong et al are saying, try to understand them, and then if you have any specific criticisms of the contents of their statements, make them. But don’t call a scientist with 50 years experience a grouchy old git.
Theon said that important small scale phenomena are not included in the models – true.
He said that some scientists have manipulated data – true (eg the notorious sequence of ‘adjustments’).
Now Green and Armstrong are saying that future climate is very difficult if not impossible to forecast. Read their paper at
http://kestencgreen.com/naiveclimate.pdf

VG
January 29, 2009 5:23 am

Anthony may have noticed more AGW’s coming on this site to post (maybe since its become best science blog ect). Probably a good thing.. examples Brendan H and Flanagan. They do their cause a great favour but they rarely seem to provide data LOL. The data and then the people will decide whether AGW is or is not in the end….

Psi
January 29, 2009 5:34 am

Sekerob (22:02:29) :
From the never heard off before IIF:
Scott Armstrong (1996) Professor of Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, USA: For his work in establishing the Institute and serving as an editor of the Journal and on the Board of Directors; for his wide-ranging research contributions, particularly on the empirical evaluation of different approaches to forecasting; for innovative approaches to the teaching of forecasting.
Okay, lets follow the money trail.
There are lots of money trails to follow, Sekerob, if you want to follow that line of “reasoning.” We could start with the heavy investments of Al Gore et al in cap and trade.
To me his kind of suggested “analysis” suggests an unwillingness to deal with the fundamentally flawed science and statistics on which the AGW (at least in their extreme forms) models depend. One doesn’t have to been in the pay of “big oil” to see that the emeror of Climate Modelling is skinny dipping in the ice.

Simon Evans
January 29, 2009 5:57 am

A couple of points:
1. Armstrong suggests that the naive ‘no change’ hindcast is as useful as the hindcasts of model runs (“A forecasting model should not be used unless it can be shown to provide forecasts that are more accurate than those from this naïve model…”). This graphic shows the mean of 58 model simulations against observations from 1900 (I can’t readily find the equivalent from 1850):-
http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/graphics/ar4-wg1/jpg/faq-8-1-fig-1.jpg
The comparison, then, is between a no-trend straight line (the naive model) and the mean of the model runs. Which gives a more accurate representation of the temperatures that occurred? Can anyone seek to persuade me that a level line would have represented the temperature as well as the GCMs do?
2. Here is the Hadley graphic of recorded temperatures from 1850:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nhshgl.gif
Draw a level line from the 1850 temperature across the graph (the naive model). It can be seen that from 1920 every single annual temperature is above the ‘naive forecast’. From 1979 every year is 0.5C or more in relation to the naive forecast.
Time for some scepticism, no? If it were being suggested by those arguing their concerns regarding AGW that a straight trendline diverging at an obviously increasing rate for a period of 90 years was a ‘good enough’ representation of the record, what would be the response? That is what Armstrong is suggesting, and the overwhelming response here is one of enthusiastic approval.

gary gulrud
January 29, 2009 6:05 am

“start dampening down the hopes and expectations you have raised, otherwise in a few weeks or months there are going to be some very disappointed”
I predict individuals with these prophesies and admonitions will soon be reduced to populating street corners, in hair shirts, with signs around their neck “Will model climate for food!”.

Wondering Aloud
January 29, 2009 6:06 am

Chris V.
I am glad you are here. Though you are not winning the argument in this case, I would actually think a professional forcaster would be better at evaluating the general quality of forecasts than a climatologist who appears not to understand the weakness of the model.
Sometimes you help people here stay focused, it is easy to get emotional and personal on this issue where so much is not as it seems.
I do think the people at GISS need to either make a large scale attempt to correct and revise the rubbish that the GISS record is now, and to make how it is done transparent so it is reproducible or they should be sacked. If it can’t be reproduced it isn’t science. At the present time the record and model coming out of these people are not up to the standards of Cold Fusion much less science.

January 29, 2009 6:11 am

‘Inhofe is using Theon as cannon fodder, and as a result Theon just comes across as a grouchy old git trying to settle scores. It’s sad and pathetic. If you want to maintain the credibility of your blog, don’t encourage this sort of behaviour.’
Is that something like: “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”?

Gurnsy
January 29, 2009 6:14 am

The IIF logo also reminds me of the “” from Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
Rather apt lyrics from “Goodbye Blue Sky”:
“Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when the
promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue
sky?”
Thank you Anthony and to you all for this wonderful, eye-opening site.

Luis Dias
January 29, 2009 6:16 am

I’d like to know which “rules” the climate scientists violated, and if such rules are IIF’s own home-made guidelines, or if such rules are recognized by the IPCC or other major independent group.
REPLY: The IPCC makes up their own rules and “home-made guidelines” too, your point? – Anthony

Tom in normal Florida
January 29, 2009 6:22 am

Perhaps all this warming/cooling won’t really matter.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,483477,00.html

Luis Dias
January 29, 2009 6:25 am

RC replied to this 19 months ago.
Here.

Flanagan
January 29, 2009 6:32 am

VG,
I’ve been here for a while, now… If you want data from me, I can only suggest you the references I gave in the topic on Theon.

Luis Dias
January 29, 2009 6:40 am

What astounds me is the sheer gullibility of almost every single one reader of this blog. Once I skimmed the text, it was clearly obvious that this wasn’t mainstream science, it was fringe science trying to evaluate the mainstream one. Where’s the data from their analysis? And what rules, what criteria is actually used in their evaluation? That’s the good discussion, and until that is addressed (and probably shown to be bollocks’ science trying to say that the other one is the bollocks one) this is sheer opinion FUD. Just like the Theon thing. Even RC posted about this YEARS ago, and debunked the hell out of it in style.
Yes, yes, the RC are the devil themselves. Cut the crap, I don’t care who says what. I care about juice. And while these guys didn’t have it, RC did gave it an astounding punch in the face.
[~snip~ Calling the site owner derogatory names isn’t going to get you anywhere. ~ dbstealey, mod.]
Really. The “best science blog”. Holy Macaroni.

Frank K.
January 29, 2009 6:46 am

John Philip (05:21:27) :
“Looking at actual source code can be informative, however it is frequently better to take the algorithms e.g. for adjustment (which have always been public domain, in the case of GISTEMP) and develop your own software independently to verify results.”
What algorithms? Please tell me where they have documented their algorithms in detail and related it to their software implementation?? And, no the brief descriptions given at the GISS website do NOT constitute documentation! Nor do the pointers to journal articles, which never describe the algorithms in adequate detail.
GISS has decided that their public domain codes do NOT need to be properly documented and, accordingly, no one can independently determine what they’re solving. And the FORTRAN is a jumbled mess. I URGE everyone with programming experience to download their junk and see for themselves…
John – maybe you could find the differential equations and boundary conditions that Model E is solving – please report back what you find…

Just want truth...
January 29, 2009 6:52 am

” sod (05:21:00) :
you guys are falling into a trap. Armstrong isn t “the leading expert” on this subject. Armstrong IS this subject! ”
I see more comments from guys of your ilk lately. Is it because WUWT won “weblog best science blog of the year” so your ilk are coming here trying to discredit WUWT?
We are falling in to a trap? Tell us about your qualifications as a climate modeller that makes you able to discern this ‘trap’.
But we all know this is what you are now doing to Dr J. Scott Armstrong :
“MANMADE” GLOBAL WARMING RELIGION – RULE ONE:
NEVER discuss the science.
Attack the man.
Then repeat the mantra.
Note: Repeat RULE ONE mindlessly until you feel you’ve won the argument.”
What do you think of Antonino Zichichi who has said :
“models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are incoherent and invalid from a scientific point of view”.
Before answering what you think of Antonino Zichichi you might want to read about him first at this link :
http://www.ccsem.infn.it/em/zichichi/short_bio.html

sod
January 29, 2009 6:52 am

I’d like to know which “rules” the climate scientists violated, and if such rules are IIF’s own home-made guidelines, or if such rules are recognized by the IPCC or other major independent group.
nobody is using those rules, apart from Armstrong and associates.
just think about it for a moment: every climate paper would answer all 140 “principles”.
all papers would double in size, without any real benefit.
REPLY: Just getting them to follow one or two forecasting principles would be a great step forward. Since you seem to be against organizations that create standards, may I suggest that you systematically go through your dwelling and remove all standards for compliance that have been put into it, then watch the results of the entropy creep in. By the way, how’s that website of yours bashing the surge in Iraq doing for you? Looks a little stale. Your moniker SOD stands for “seed of doubt” which was your skeptical view of the government position on Iraq, yet you follow the AGW position without such critical questioning. Why is that? – Anthony

foinavon
January 29, 2009 6:57 am

Going through the list:
ONE. Since we don’t know the greenhouse gas emission scenarios, climate models are run to explore ranges of likelihood in response to ranges of emission scenarios. They’re used to test understanding of the inputs into the earth’s climate and their interactions and so on. So we know they’re not “forecasts” in the commonly used sense of the word.
What are these “72 scientific principles of forecasting”? Where is “Green and Armstrong 2008”? Not in the scientific database. We’d surely like to see it before accepting this analysis. Can we have a proper citation?
TWO. All papers published in the scientific literature are subject to peer review. Papers are submitted to appropriate journals, editors select appropriate reviewers. Why should “forecasters” be used as reviewers of scientific papers that they’re unlikely to understand? If a forecaster (of the type suggested by Armstrong) is involved, it might more usefully be in the arena of policymaking.
THREE. A perusal of Armstrong’s publications indicates that he works largely in the area of conflict forecasting, at least in recent years, and that’s certainly the case with Green [a recent paper K. C. Green and J. S. Armstrong (2007) “structured analogies for forecasting” Int. J. Forecasting 23 365-376 describes forecasting success in relation to “nurses disputes”, “artists protest”, “Telco takeover”, and such like)]. He publishes on “game theory” and “predicting presidential elections” and whether the scientific citation index is fully accurate (it isn’t!) and so on. His complaint against “expert opinion” might be relevant to those arenas.
So Armstrong suggests under his point 3 “Expert opinions are an inappropriate forecasting method in situations that involve high complexity and high uncertainty.” But we’re not talking about “expert opinion”. We’re talking about scientific analysis. Clearly the question of “expert opinion” may relate to policy decisions (that are more akin to the issue of conflict resolution, for example). But in these cases climate models are only a part of the input to policymaking which assesses the entire scientific evidence as well as economic considerations, cost-benefit analyses, environmental issues and so on.
FOUR. Armstrong says: “In other words, in what ways might the effects be beneficial or harmful? Here again, we have been unable to find any scientific forecasts—as opposed to speculation—despite our appeals for such studies.”
There’s in fact plenty of this in the scientific literature. Here’s a recent example of a scientific analysis that incorporates the economic impact of global warming into predictions of the geographical-specified impacts. That took 5 minutes to find. A quick perusal of the scientific database indicates there’s lot’s of scientific analysis in this area.
W. D. Nordhaus (2006) Geography and macroeconomics: New data and new findings. PNAS 103, 3510-3517.
http://www.pnas.org/content/103/10/3510.abstract?sid=7b65659b-5045-490c-92a7-d7004ee586ad
FIVE. Likewise there’s an abundance of published science on cost-benefit analysis in climate change and mitigation. In relation to analyses of costs and benefits of alternative actions to combat climate change, this comes in essentially two broad flavours. The first is the direct scientific study of potential mitigating technologies. There’s a huge amount of study in this area. I opened the current issue of Nature this morning and found a very good example of the careful analysis of the likely benefits of iron-seeding of primary ocean productivity to promote ocean-uptake of CO2 (i.e. dump loads of iron into the oceans). If one wishes to assess the “costs and benefits of alternative actions” that’s the sort of info we need and it’s being published rather widely and in abundance.
R. T. Pollard et al. (2009) Southern Ocean deep-water carbon export enhanced by natural iron fertilization. 457, 577-580.
The other sort is the more academic approach to cost benefit analysis. Nordhaus’s paper cited above is an example of a scientific analysis of cost-benefit analysis in relation to climate-change, and there’s lots more of this stuff out there.
SIX. It’s not obvious that Armstrong’s apparent requirement for a naïve model is really very useful in climate change forecasting. Nevertheless we already clearly do have a “naïve model” for climate forecasting. It’s the vast amount of empirical, observational and theoretical analysis that indicates that the earth under the present climate regime has a climate sensitivity near 3 oC of temperature rise per doubling of atmospheric CO2, and that the earth has various elements of “inertia” that define the rate at which a response to a new temperature equilibrium is achieved in response to enhanced forcing. The climate models are entirely consistent with that. They give further information in allowing predictions of likely geographical distributions of enhanced warming, and precipitation patterns and so on, under given emission scenarios. So they seem to fulfil Armstrong’s requirements.
SEVEN. The climate system is stable when it’s stable and isn’t when it isn’t. According to Armstrong, climate forecasts he made starting from 1850 were within 0.5 oC of the realized outcome. And so? It would be an extraordinarily poor forecast if they weren’t within 0.5 oC, over 65 years since the global warming from 1850-1915 was of the order of a few tenths of a degree. And how can one forecast the temperature of the following 100 years from the temperature of a single year anyway……..?
EIGHT. Both the science and the policymaking seems pretty conservative to me. I don’t understand who’s speaking here by the way. Sections 1-8 seem to be Armstrong’s own words. Section 8 has an “according to Dr. Armstrong…”, in it? Who’s writing this bit?
REPLY: Nice to see you cleaned up the text, it is too bad you didn’t want to come out of the shadow of anonymity. – Anthony

January 29, 2009 7:00 am

F Rasmin (21:51:26) :
Snow? It was just over 113 degrees fahrenheit here in Adelaide Australia yesterday.

Meanwhile, were about to have our coldest winter in 13 years…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7858104.stm
We are both just posting weather events, which as we know, is not the same as climate…

Frank K.
January 29, 2009 7:03 am

By the way, regarding that great forum at Columbia Univ. that “supports” Model E users.
http://forums.edgcm.columbia.edu/forumdisplay.php?f=26
I popped over there, and found the latest post was from Sept 2008 as follows:
“First post, hoping that this forum is alive enough to prompt a response.
I recently downloaded and compiled the Model E on my linux box.
ftp://ftp.giss.nasa.gov/pub/modelE/modelE1.tar.gz
I downloaded the initialization data in the fixed.tar.gz file also provided.
ftp://ftp.giss.nasa.gov/pub/modelE/fixed.tar.gz
But I was styimed by an error that called out missing ISCCP.tautable files
While I found the ISCCP web site with no problem, I cannot find a single file that looks appropriate.
Anyone here have a suggestion as to where I can find a ISCCP.tautable file for Model E?”
NO responses were posted. Wow, what a great help those GISS guys are!!

JP
January 29, 2009 7:03 am

Lost in all the debate about climate sensitivity, feedback loops, GCMs, and hockey sticks is the fact that AGW proponents cannot predict future global temps with any precisions. There answer to this is simple: they don’t make forecasts but they do issue scenario projections. Most AGW proponents forget this fact when they say that by 2100 the global temps will be 2 or 4 deg C warmer than the year 2000. Hansen himself didn’t forecast anything in 1988, but gave 3 possible temperature projections based on CO2 increases. He had a 1 in 3 chance of hitting his target.
The same with the IPCC 2007 TAR. The IPCC issued scenario projections. After looking at the scenarios it became apparent that the IPCC hasn’t a clue what our climate will be like in 100 years. Call it what you want, but this isn’t science. If the the science is settled why the lack of confidence? Why all the scenarios? This why the Alarmists are all over the board on everything from sea levels, to rainfall projections, to TC predictions.
Forecasting is a much more rigourous thing. It either hits or it doesn’t. You are either wrong or you are right -especially in aviation weather forecasting. Private weather forecasters have businesses riding on thier forecasts. Commodity traders depend on thier long range and seasonal forecasts. If you are wrong too often you will soon be out of work. It is not surprising that one of the largest group of “deniers” comes from the people who do weather day in and day out. Practice breeds scepticism. Climate scientists have thier theories, statistics, and computer driven models. They will be long gone (and thier predictions long forgotten) by the time thier predictions can be verified.

John W.
January 29, 2009 7:08 am

Luis Dias (06:16:44) :
I’d like to know which “rules” the climate scientists violated, and if such rules are IIF’s own home-made guidelines, or if such rules are recognized by the IPCC or other major independent group.

Actually, Luis, we’d all like to know what if any rules, from any recognized, established scientific or engineering discipline the IPCC followed. Or did they use home-made rules as needed to support their political agenda?
With regard to the IIF, it is a professional organization, just as the IEEE, AMS, AIAA, SAE, ASME, etc. are professional organizations. As such, its purpose is establishing standards for the profession, just as the other organizations do.
While we’re on the subject of professional organizations, the IEEE has standards for simulations. Did any of the GCM contributors to the IPCC follow them? If not, is it because the IEEE is not recognized by the IPCC? Or they aren’t considered a “major independent group?” Or are the IEEE’s “home-made” rules irrelevant?
You should be careful about sneering at a professional organization. It creates a very legitimate opportunity to draw inferences that reflect poorly.

January 29, 2009 7:09 am

Just want truth… (06:52:10) :
“MANMADE” GLOBAL WARMING RELIGION – RULE ONE:
NEVER discuss the science.
Attack the man.
Then repeat the mantra.

Reminds me about the rules of fightclub from the film, aptly named… Fightclub, staring Brad Pitt…
1st RULE: You do not talk about FIGHT CLUB.
2nd RULE: You DO NOT talk about FIGHT CLUB.
lol!

BernardP
January 29, 2009 7:14 am

“Dr J. Scott Armstrong, tabled a statement”
So where exactly was this “tabled”?

Robert
January 29, 2009 7:16 am

@JP (07:03:41) :
“He had a 1 in 3 chance of hitting his target.”
He had a 1 in 4 chance of missing its target completely.