Subject: Gore bet challenge.doc |
From: FOS extracts |
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 21:35:42 -0600 |
To: |
Al Gore’s doom-mongering documentary An Inconvenient Truth - in which he
turned his rather drab PowerPoint presentation on climate change into a
cinematic warning to the world about man’s toxic impact on the planet - has
generated miles of newspaper column inches. He’s won widespread praise from
greens for converting ‘ordinary people’ (ie, the
previously uncaring popcorn-chomping masses) to the green cause. He’s been
given a telling-off by some climate scientists for twisting the data in order
to send a moral message about mankind’s destructiveness (1). Others have
accused him of being a hypocrite: apparently Gore, who has two very big
homes, used 221,000 kilowatt hours of electricity in 2006, 20 times the
American national average (2). And now, in the latest post-Truth twist, Gore has been challenged
to a $20,000 wager that he is wrong on global warming. ‘The
aim of the bet is really to promote the proper use of science, rather than
the opinion-led science we have seen lately.’ Scott Armstrong is professor of
marketing at the Armstrong
got the idea for the climate change wager from the late Julian Simon, an
economist at the Armstrong
and his colleague Kesten Green, senior research
fellow at Armstrong
and Green – whom I’m sure won’t mind being referred to as forecasting geeks –
argue that those who predict sweeping changes in the climate break many of
the golden rules of forecasting, as laid out in the 2001 book The Principles of Forecasting. In their paper, they
assessed ‘the extent to which long-term forecasts of global average
temperatures have been derived using evidence-based forecasting methods’.
They surveyed 51 scientists and others involved in making global-warming
predictions, asking them to provide scientific articles that contained credible
forecasts to underpin their view that temperature will rise rapidly. Most of
those surveyed – 30 out of 51 – cited the IPCC Report as the best forecasting
source. Yet according to Armstrong and Green, the forecasts in the IPCC
Report are not the outcome
of scientific forecasting procedures – rather the Report presents ‘the
opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex
writing’ (4). Indeed, in their ‘forecasting audit’ of the IPPC Report,
Armstrong and Green found that it violated 72 of the principles of
forecasting. Such
as? ‘Well, some of the principles of forecasting can appear counterintuitive,
so bear with me’, says Armstrong. ‘One of the principles is that agreement
amongst experts is actually not a very good measure of accuracy. This is
especially true if experts are working closely together, and towards a
certain goal, as they do in the IPCC. Such an atmosphere does not tend to
generate reliable or accurate forecasts. Another principle of forecasting is
that when there is uncertainty, your forecasts should be conservative,
you should hedge your bets a little bit. The IPCC and others do exactly the
opposite: despite their uncertainty, the fact that they don’t know for
certain what will happen, they are radical in their predictions of warming
and destruction and so on.’ The
IPCC Report violated these two principles of forecasting, claims Armstrong,
and 70 more. As an example of why forecasting needs to be done properly, in
their paper for the symposium he and Green point to various headlines that
have appeared in the New York Times
over the past 80 years. On 18 September 1924: ‘MacMillan
Reports Signs of New Ice Age.’ On 27 March 1933: ‘ Armstrong
and Green may have a point about the IPPC Report consisting more of
scientists’ opinions rather than scientifically validated forecasts of
temperature change. And it will be interesting to see if Gore accepts their
bet. But I can’t help wondering if one of the main problems with the debate
about climate change today is precisely the focus on forecasting, whether it
is the allegedly wild forecasting contained in the IPCC Report or the more principled
forecasting proposed by Armstrong and Green. To
debate the future on the basis of scientific forecasts about temperature is
to denigrate human activity and impact. Humans don’t, or at least shouldn’t,
sit around waiting for the inevitable to occur; we are capable of shaping our
world and of addressing and solving problems as they arise. The Forecast View
of History – which takes climatic developments of the past and measures them
against the present, in order to make predictions about the future – tends to
be fatalistic, viewing humans as objects of history rather than as creators
of change. Perhaps we should spend less time forecasting what will
(allegedly) happen, like modern-day tealeaf-readers, and more time making things happen in the way we want and
need them to. I would put my money on human ingenuity over scary weather
forecasts any day of the week. The Climate Bet was
launched by Scott Armstrong last week – find out more here. Read Armstrong and
Green’s paper Global Warming: Forecasts by
Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts here. Brendan O’Neill
is editor of spiked.
Visit his personal website here.
Previously
on spiked Daniel Ben-Ami reviewed Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and said it’s time for a heated debate. Brendan O’Neill said the demonisation of
‘climate change denial’ has had a chilling effect on free speech. He later
interviewed Martin Durkin, director of The Great Global Warming Swindle. Rob Lyons said the Al Gore-inspired Live Earth event is nothing to sing and dance
about. Or read more at spiked issue Environment. (1)
See Keep politics out of
science – and vice versa, by Brendan O’Neill (2)
Group faults Al Gore on environmental claims, National Public Radio, 28
February 2007 (3)
Global Warming: Forecasts by
Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts, Armstrong and Green: read
it here. (4)
Global Warming: Forecasts by
Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts, Armstrong and Green: read
it here. (5)
Global Warming: Forecasts by
Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts, Armstrong and Green: read
it here. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3533/ |