NSIAP: Report to congress: IPCC & alarmist forecasts violate forecasting principles

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Research to date on Forecasting for the Manmade Global Warming Alarm
Testimony to Subcommittee on Energy and Environment
Committee on Science, Space and Technology – March 31, 2011
Professor J. Scott Armstrong, University of Pennsylvania,
with Kesten C. Green, University of South Australia,
and Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

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The validity of the manmade global warming alarm requires the support of scientific forecasts of (1) a
substantive long-term rise in global mean temperatures in the absence of regulations, (2) serious net
harmful effects due to global warming, and (3) cost-effective regulations that would produce net
beneficial effects versus alternatives such as doing nothing.

Without scientific forecasts for all three aspects of the alarm, there is no scientific basis to enact
regulations. In effect, it is a three-legged stool. Despite repeated appeals to global warming alarmists, we
have been unable to find scientific forecasts for any of the three legs.

We drew upon scientific (evidence-based) forecasting principles to audit the forecasting
procedures used to forecast global mean temperatures by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) –leg “1” of the stool. This audit found that the procedures violated 81% of the 89 relevant
forecasting principles.

We also did an audit of the forecasting procedures used for two papers that were designed to
support proposed regulation related to protecting polar bears – leg “3” of the stool. On average, these
procedures violated 85% of the 90 relevant principles.

The warming alarmists have not demonstrated the predictive validity of their procedures. Instead,
their argument for predictive validity is based on their claim that nearly all scientists agree with the
forecasts. Such an appeal to “voting” is contrary to the scientific method. It is also incorrect.

We conducted a validation test of the IPCC forecasts based on the assumption that there would be
no interventions. This test found that the errors for IPCC model long-term forecasts (91 to 100 years in
the future) were 12.6 times larger than those from an evidence-based “no change” model.

Based on our analyses, we concluded that the global warming alarm is an anti-scientific political
movement.

We then turned to the “structured analogies” method to forecast the likely outcomes of this
movement. In this ongoing study, we have, to date, identified 26 historical alarmist movements. None of
the forecasts for the analogous alarms proved correct. In the 25 alarms that called for government
intervention, the government impost regulations in 23. None of the 23 interventions was effective and
harm was caused by 20 of them.

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