No cause for alarm at five-year mid-point of the Armstrong-Gore climate “bet”
By J. Scott Armstrong
In 2007, University of Pennsylvania Professor J. Scott Armstrong’s attention was drawn to former VP Gore’s concerns about global warming. Having spent five decades studying the science of forecasting, Armstrong decided to examine the basis for the forecasts of global warming. He was unable to find a single scientific forecast to support the claim that the Earth was becoming dangerously warmer or colder.
Instead, he found that some scientists were using improper forecasting methods to make forecasts. Professor Armstrong alerted Mr. Gore to this fact and suggested that they cooperate in a validation test of dangerous global warming forecasts. He suggested a 10-year bet for which he would forecast no long-term trend in climate, while Mr. Gore could chose forecasts from any climate model.
After a series of emails, Mr. Gore declined, apparently sticking with his claim that no time could be devoted to further study, because we were near a “tipping point,” a position backed by James Hansen of NASA. Professor Armstrong claimed that nothing new was happening, so there was neither cause for alarm nor need for government action.
Professor Armstrong nevertheless determined to pursue his proposed test of the alarmist forecast. By using the commonly adopted U.N. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change forecast—3°C of warming per century—to represent Mr. Gore’s position, the theclimatebet.com has tracked the Armstrong-Gore “bet” with monthly updates.
Mr. Gore should be pleased to find that his grave concerns about a “tipping point” have turned out to be unfounded. As shown on theclimatebet.com, Professor Armstrong’s forecasts have been more accurate than Mr. Gore’s for 40 of the 60 months to date and for four of the five years. In fact, the latest global temperature is exactly where it was at the beginning of the “bet.”
Professor Armstrong was not surprised. With some minor exceptions, his forecast was consistent with evidence-based forecasting principles. In contrast, the IPCC’s forecasting procedures have been found to violate 72 of the 89 relevant principles.
When he proposed the bet, Professor Armstrong expected to have a somewhat less than 70% chance of winning given the natural variation in global mean temperatures for a ten-year period. In light of the results to date, he expects an even better chance of winning, but as Yogi Berra said, “It’s not over till it’s over.” Furthermore, policy decisions will require validations testing for hundreds of years, not for just one decade. At the time of writing, there has been no trend in global mean temperatures for 16 years.
January 19, 2013
RoHa says:
January 20, 2013 at 5:16 am
> It seems he [Yogi Bear] was named after this baseball guy.
Yep, they both reached the public’s attention in the 1950s.
He played for the New York Yankees, which were managed by Casey Stengel. Both of them managed to torture English into timeless nonsense statements that say more than were meant at the time.
A couple “Stengelese” comments:
On his three catchers: “I got one that can throw but can’t catch, one that can catch but can’t throw, and one who can hit but can’t do either.
Stengel remarked that he had been fired for turning 70, and that he would “never make that mistake again.”
Kelvin Vaughan asks “What happened in 1998?”
Release of heat into the atmosphere from the 97/98 El Nino.
Kelvin Vaughan says:
January 20, 2013 at 3:07 am
> If you subtract 0.29 deg. C. from the UHA satellite data set for the lower troposphere from 1998 on then the trendline is virtually flat. What happened in 1998?
Huge El Niño. The warmed water gradually migrated to higher latitudes. Bob Tisdale keeps pointing out that El Niños do a better job heating the planet than La Niñas do to cool it.
The really serious bet is for those who have invested their monies into carbon schemes. They may lose their shirts, unless they have hedged their bets with big oil.
BBC pension investments.
http://www.iigcc.org/about-us/members
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/12/breaking-the-secret-list-of-the-bbc-28-is-now-public/#comment-1146022
Ric Werme says:
January 20, 2013 at 6:34 am
….Bob Tisdale keeps pointing out that El Niños do a better job heating the planet than La Niñas do to cool it.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
So far….
We have not yet seen what happens when we get wimpy El Niños or La nada and lots of La Niñas but that may be what we will be seeing in the future.
Even the EPA shows the SST has gone flat recently graph There has to be a way for the oceans to cool and I would thing the ratio of the number of El Niños and La Niñas over time would be it.
So the heat from the 97/98 El Nino has not escaped into space. It has just sat around in the lower troposphere ever since?
@Gail
TI had no idea the EPA publishes graphs of Sea Surface Temperature !
They should be defunded and sent back to their core duties. Climate science should most definitely not be part of their remit.
“So the heat from the 97/98 El Nino has not escaped into space. It has just sat around in the lower troposphere ever since?”
No, it remained in the oceans as warm water being slowly distributed around the world for years afterwards, keeping atmospheric temperatures a fairly high level.
And technically, it’s the major La Nina from 1994-96 that actually created that huge pool of warm water in the western pacific. The 1997/8 El Nino just distributed it across the Pacific and around the world. This was followed later by the massive double La Nina years of 1999-2003, that created more hot water, and later distributed it in the 2005 El Nino. Those two major La Ninas and subsequent El Ninos are what has raised air temperatures worldwide. ANd yet, even that later cycle didn’t create a new high temperature level, it merely sustained the same levels created by the first wave. As the ENSO patterns have changed, with the PDO going negative, there’s no sign yet of any any further increase in atmospheric temps in the works. That’s why many think we may begin to see an actual reduction in atmospheric temps in the coming years.
That’s why it’s also a bit misleading to say that El Ninos warm the atmosphere, while La Ninas cool it. La Ninas trap ocean heat at deep subsurface levels in the eastern Pacific, while El NInos actually partially release that heat into the atmosphere, where some of it gets lost to space. (Other parts travel in subsurface columns around the world even for years, surfacing and releasing their heat more slowly into the air). So as far as heat content goes, El Ninos are actually cooling events, and La Ninas are warming events. But it depends on how the cycles actually dominate one another. The cooling effect of La Ninas on the air has to do with it creating upwellings of cold deep water in the eastern Pacific, that then dominates the equatorial region with cold surface water. But as this water warms at the surface, and piles up in the western pacific, this creates an overall warming of the oceans, not a cooling.
As the PDO goes negative, the La Nina pattern becomes fairly consistent, but not excessive, allowing the warmed water to be retained in the eastern pacific at moderate levels, and the El Ninos never develop sufficient strength to redistribute the water worldwide. The effect is a general cooling effect.
@Ric
“Yep, they both reached the public’s attention in the 1950s”
Maybe the American public. The rest of the world only noticed Yogi Bear.
@Ric.
Hence our puzzlement at his name.
Mosher’s point is a fair one, but maybe this is what Al Gore predicted when they talked? A lot of what he claims is well beyond even the most ludicrous statements issued by IPCC.
Heck, Al’s duck-out excuse was “tipping point” wasn’t it?
Mosher’s point is a fair one, but maybe this is what Al Gore predicted when they talked? A lot of what he claims is well beyond even the most ludicrous statements issued by IPCC.
Heck, Al’s duck-out excuse was “tipping point” wasn’t it?
Put your money where your mouth is Mosh.
I am talking small money because of my income. £20 which is 2/7 of my weekly income.
DaveE.
A recent thread was Great Moments in Failed Predictions
Professor Scott Armstrong also looked at “expert predictions” and essentially said the experts are no better than anyone else at getting the predictions correct.
Forecasting: Of Suckers and Seers
Armstrong is well worth reading. His courses must be very popular given his ability of taking a dry subject and injecting humor.
@Mosher: You wrote Steven Mosher says:
January 19, 2013 at 12:16 pm
The mean of the models is .2C per decade. Seems as though Armstrong has violated the principle of understanding the actual forecasts.
+++++++++++
If you bothered to read the assessment of the IPCC at the time, it reads as follows:
“An expert assessment based on the combination of available constraints from observations (assessed in Chapter 9) and the strength of known feedbacks simulated in the models used to produce the climate change projections in this chapter indicates that the equilibrium global mean SAT warming for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), or ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’, is likely to lie in the range 2°C to 4.5°C, with a most likely value of about 3°C.”
Question for Mosher. So where do you get off changing the goal post again?
El Niño events are net cooling events, not warming events – energy stored in the ocean leaves the earth system. Similar to what happens when ice cover is lost in the Arctic ocean by melting through infusion of warmer water from lower latitudes or by open water exposure from ice movement and breakup caused by wind storms. Heat is released from the ocean by radiation and conduction, passes through the atmosphere by convection and radiation, and then disappears to the dark spaces between the stars and galaxies beyond, never to return. They warm nothing with any permanence, and they in no way attract or can attract more solar energy than they release.
You should have specified constant or real dollars. You can have some fun by suggesting the terms of the bet be retroactively revised to be paid in 2005 dollars. The response will tell you much about your opponent’s confidence just now in his wager.
For Prof. Armstrong and Mr. Gore
I think that this is not based on accepted scientific indicators, nor does it have anything to do with the real causes of climate change.
The real causes of climate change are directly related to the interaction between the planets, the Sun causing changes, and the appearance of the sun, in the opposite effect, changes the conditions on the planets, and even climate change.
These are many different cycles of action and duration.
Could addresses of these two gentlemen, I put forth ideas to them for all time to know what this whole issue. Of course, if they accept the following agreement. I think they are so powerful that they can provide the technical and commercial terms to perform this huge undertaking.
“They warm nothing with any permanence, and they in no way attract or can attract more solar energy than they release.”
Not entirely true. By changing the pattern of cloud cover over the tropical Pacific, ENSO conditions can actually change the total solar energy received by the oceans. They can also store that solar energy deep within the oceans, and distribute it around the world, resulting in actual changes in the total energy balance of the climate system.
Any appeal to equilibrium on a global scale necessarily invokes timespans well beyond the reach of accurate measurement. It is therefore useful and used as a fudge factor.
A bit late, but another paper by Armstrong & Green 2007 concerning Climate forecasting should be required reading. The paper also discusses the “Seer Sucker” theory mentioned by Gail Combs above. So if we are “deniers” then warmists could be seen as “Seer Suckers”*. Love it!
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/4361/1/MPRA_paper_4361.pdf
* “No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, seers will find suckers”.
Mods, please correct Typo as below:
* “No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, seers will find suckers”.