J. Scott Armstrong - Forecasting

Forecasting

• Professor Armstrong is the author of Long-Range Forecasting and the editor and co-author of Principles of Forecasting.

• He was a founder and editor of the Journal of Forecasting, and a founder of the International Journal of Forecasting, and the International Symposium on Forecasting.

• Armstrong examined the methods used by the IPCC to make projections. In an article published in Energy & Environment, he claimed that the IPCC and climate scientists have ignored the scientific literature on forecasting principles. Armstrong wrote:

When we inspected the 17 articles, we found that none of them referred to the scientific literature on forecasting methods.

It is difficult to understand how scientific forecasting could be conducted without reference to the research literature on how to make forecasts. One would expect to see empirical justification for the forecasting methods that were used. We concluded that climate forecasts are informed by the modelers’ experience and by their models—but that they are unaided by the application of forecasting principles. (page 1015)

However, according to Amstrup and others' published rebuttal in the journal Interfaces:

Green and Armstrong (2007, p.997) also concluded that the thousands of refereed scientific publications that comprise the basis of the IPCC reports and represent the state of scientific knowledge on past, present and future climates "were not the outcome of scientific procedures." Such cavalier statements appear to reflect an overt attempt by the authors of those reports to cast doubt about the reality of human-caused global warming ...

• Armstrong extended a Global Warming Challenge to Al Gore in June 2007, in the style of the Simon–Ehrlich wager. Each side was to place $10,000 ($20,000 total) in trust, with the winner being determined by future temperature change. Gore declined the wager, stating that he does not gamble. Climatologist Gavin Schmidt described Armstrong's wager as "essentially a bet on year to year weather noise" rather than on climate change.

• Armstrong has published articles and testified before Congress on forecasts of polar bear populations, arguing that previous estimates were too flawed to justify listing the bear as an endangered species. In an evaluation of Armstrong and other authors’ criticism of polar bear population forecasts, Amstrup and other authors, writing a response in the journal Interfaces, concluded that all of the claims made by Armstrong, which included lack of independence of the USGS, were either mistaken or misleading.