Rejected by the Evidence

Kesten GreenJuly 21, 2014 at 12:54 AM

Subject: Dangerous warming hypothesis rejected by the evidence

Dear Dr Keating,

We are delighted that you have expressed willingness to accept evidence that would lead an independent judge to reject the hypothesis of dangerous manmade global warming. We are writing to take up your challenge to provide such evidence...
Because submissions to your blog have a character limit and because embedded links to supporting evidence do not appear to be possible, we have posted our letter of response to your challenge here: http://www.kestencgreen.com/GAS-Keating.pdf
We look forward to your response. We are particularly interested in how you define "scientific evidence," and how you plan to make such judgments in an objective and scientific manner. Perhaps you might want to consider a science court? We would be happy to propose scientists for such a court.


Kesten C. Green
J. Scott Armstrong
Willie Soon

July 20, 2014

Response:

My understanding of your paper is that you reject man made global warming because you don't trust the forecasts of the dangers. This is not only non-scientific, but irrelevant.

Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that the forecasts of danger are overstated, just as you claim. How does that show that man made global warming is not real? In fact, your very argument seems to support the idea that AGW is real by saying it is causing damage, just not as much as some people claim.

In fact, your entire submission consisted of criticizing FORECASTS. I find your comments to be very questionable with a great deal of bias in your work, indicating you are predisposed to find the conclusion you want. But, nothing you did addresses the issue of man made global warming TODAY. Maybe the forecasts are right. Maybe they are wrong. Maybe they are somewhere in between. So, what? How does any of that prove that the warming we are witnessing today (which you seem to acknowledge) is not man made?

One of the comments to your posting was very pertinent and I quote it here:

These 'Principles of Forecasting' appear to be derived from the field of econometrics forecasting with the main paper referenced from a Dr. J. Scott Armstrong, who appears to come from a Marketing background.
Here is the 'Principles of Forecasting' referenced in your paper:
http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/files/standardshort.pdf
Dr. Kesten C. Green appears to come from a management background.
Dr. Willie Soon is the only geoscientist/physicist out of this trio.
In your paper you make the statement:
"Kesten Green and I examined the references to determine whether the
authors of Chapter 8 were familiar with the evidence-based literature on forecasting. We found that none of their 788 references related to that body of literature. We could find no references that validated their choice of forecasting procedures. In other words, the IPCC report contained no evidence that the forecasting procedures they used were based on evidence of their predictive ability."
If the 788 people who you surveyed did not come from an econometrics forecasting background, then how exactly do you expect them to know about these principles? Meteorological forecasting has been around a lot longer than that paper from 2001.

At best, you raised questions about forecasting methods for future effects of climate change, but you did not do anything to prove man made global warming is not real. This is not to say you don't have some good points because there are things you said I agree with (although I disagree with you on others). But, that isn't what the challenge is about.