Climate Change forecasts invalid!!
On the Stuff website is an NZPA story about a submission to the Parliamentary Finance Select Committee reviewing the Government’s Climate Change (Emissions Trade and Renewable Preference) Bill.
This story is very interesting because the peer reviewed author claims the IPCC report’s forecasts are unscientific and break accepted forecasting principles.
The text is reproduced here:-
Dr Green, the author of a peer-reviewed paper auditing the forecasting methods of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), opposed the bill because he claimed it was based on “invalid climate forecasts”.
He told Parliament’s finance select committee that authors of the IPCC fourth assessment report provided sufficient information to observe predic tions violated 72 of 89 accepted principles of forecasting.
There was insufficient information to judge how closely a further 51 principles had been followed.
“Some individual principles that were violated are so important that violation of any one of them alone invalidates the IPCC’s forecasts,” he said.
These IPCC forecasts drew on six years of research by 2500 scientists from more than 130 countries, and said global warming was “unequivocal” with human activity more than 90 percent likely to blame for an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, to 379 parts per million (ppm), up from 280ppm before the Industrial Revolution.
They warned that by 2050, there is very likely to be loss of high-value land, faster road deterioration, degraded beaches, and reduced farm and forestry production in southern and southeastern Australia and parts of eastern New Zealand.
The w armer temperatures and decreasing water resources would increase the burden of some diseases, and global sea levels would rise 59cm this century.
Professor Scott Armstrong, of Pennsylvania University – who wrote the global warming forecast audit with Dr Green – put in a written submission to the committee, claiming they had been unable to find a single “scientific” forecast of global warming.
Now it is not clear that the paper says global warming is not happening, but it does appear to say that the accepted conclusion in the IPCC Report, the ’so-called’ settled science is not so settled after all. This does not mean there is not a problem, but that the problem may well be of a different scale than previously thought. Obviously that could be both up or down.
Now Adam is not certain what it all means, but he is certain this is a matter which deserves wider exposure and debate.
Dr Green’s website is here. It has links to a forecasting methodology ste and a copy of a paper by Dr Green and Professor Scott Armstrong of Pennsylvania University. Prof Armstrong is internationally known for his pioneering work on forecasting methods. He teaches at the Wharton Business School.
