An insight for every school textbook on climate: '...we concluded that the global warming alarm is an anti-scientific political movement.'

Schools everywhere have been exposed to, or even immersed in, the ill-founded alarm over CO2 in the atmosphere.  It will take some time to get it out of school textbooks and out of the 'off-the-shelf', 'ready-to-go' section of political spin for sundry opportunists in politics and finance.  The paper quoted below can but help with this progress.

'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 (Rev)

Professor J. Scott Armstrong, University of Pennsylvania, with Kesten C. Green, University of South Australia, and Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Abstract
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.'


Source (pdf): http://www.heartland.org/custom/semod_policybot/pdf/29687.pdf