A recent posting on Matt’s Global Warming Skeptics blog http://glowarmers.blogspot.com makes an excellent point regarding the uncertain nature of the “science” being used to tell us that the world is doomed, it’s all our fault, and that we simply must alter our ways and turn over the keys to our lives to omniscient technocrats and central planners.
Professor J. Scott Armstrong teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and is the author of a widely used forecasting textbook, Forecasting Principles.
According to a recent paper by Professor Armstrong and Kersten Green cited by Matt in his post, the “recent IPCC climate models are flawed becasue the methodology used violates [no less than] 89 of the 140 principles of forecasting, 72 of which significantly alter the outcome of the forecast.”
Of the recent IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Matt reports Armstrong as responding, “We have been unable to identify any scientific forecasts to support global warming. Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder.”
In his post, Matt also quotes Dr. Jim Renwick, who served on the IPCC first working group for the Fourth Assessment Report, and who serves on the World Meteorlogical Organization Commission for Climatology Expert Team on Seasonal Forecasting [whew!] … who admits that “Climate prediction is hard. Half the variablility in the climate system is NOT PREDICTABLE [emphasis added], so we don’t expect to do terrifically well.”
http://glowarmers.blogspot.com/2007/07/how-accurate-is-ipcc-climate-forecast.html
Matt sums it up with this piece of brilliant climate forecasting from ecologist Kenneth Watt on Earth Day in 1970, in a tone reminicent of today’s Gore-ish global warming doomsaying: “If present trends continue [from 1970], the world will be about four degrees colder in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
In 1970, the super-intelligent Al Gore (IQ134) son of Senator Albert Gore Sr was word-smithing news stories for the 20th Engineer Brigade during an abbreviated 5-month tour in Vietnam, interrupted by his early and abortive attempt to acquire a degree in Divinity studies.
News flash. It’s hot in the jungle.
