Ivy League Professor Bets Al Gore $10,000 He’s Wrong About Global Warming

As most right-thinking people are aware, soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore has refused to debate scientists and politicians that disagree with his views on manmade global warming.

Of course, as you know, the debate's over.

Potentially realizing that Gore has turned down such challenges in the past, a Wharton professor is willing to put his money where his mouth is that Gore’s cataclysmic planetary predictions are wrong.

*****Critical Update after the break with more specifics about the challenge.

As marvelously reported by the Daily Pennsylvanian (emphasis added throughout):

For the past year, Al Gore has been the darling of environmentalists, as his popular documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, made their case about the dangers of global warming to people worldwide.

But now, Scott Armstrong, a Wharton Marketing professor, wants Al Gore to put his money where his mouth is.

Armstrong has challenged the former vice president to a 10-year bet, in which $10,000 from the two would be set aside in escrow as Gore pits his forecast of how much global temperature will increase during that time against a so-called "naive model," in which temperature would be expected to stay the same.

The winner would get to donate the $20,000 and accumulated interest to the charity of his choice.

How thoroughly delicious. Of course, I doubt highly that Gore, regardless of the millions of dollars he's earned in the past couple of years promoting his junk science, will accept the wager:

Armstrong explained that the idea of a bet arose out of research a colleague and he - both specialists in forecasting - had done on global-warming forecasts put out by Gore and organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-sponsored entity formed to help achieve scientific consensus on climate change.

Armstrong said that he discovered that most climate-change forecasts use bad methodology.

"We've been unable to find any scientific forecast, and what we have are forecasts by scientists," he said.

Armstrong and his colleague, Keston Green of Monash University in Australia, are presenting their findings in a paper to the International Symposium on Forecasting on Wednesday, but Armstrong said the bet is meant to serve as encouragement to his peers in the field "to start making forecasts for important problems" and not to question whether climate change is occurring, per se.

For those interested, one of Armstrong’s students, Kelly Jin, has created a website where you can follow the events surrounding this wager.

Also, folks should be aware that Armstrong is no lightweight when it comes to forecasting. As his Wharton bio outlines:

Professor Armstrong is internationally known for his pioneering work on forecasting methods. He is author of Long-Range Forecasting, the most frequently cited book on forecasting methods, and Principles of Forecasting, voted the “Favorite Book – First 25 Years” by researchers and practitioners associated with the International Institute of Forecasters. He is a co-founder of the Journal of Forecasting, the International Journal of Forecasting, the International Symposium on Forecasting, and forecastingprinciples.com. He is a co-developer of new methods including rule-based forecasting, causal forces for extrapolation, simulated interaction, and structured analogies.

In addition to forecasting, Professor Armstrong has published papers on survey research, educational methods, applied statistics, social responsibility, strategic planning, and scientific peer review. Most recently, his research activities have involved political forecasting (he is a co-founder of PollyVote.com) and forecasting for conflicts and terrorism. Among his findings is that competitor-oriented objectives are harmful to profits; formal planning improves profitability; and stakeholder management reduces social irresponsibility. He also developed the widely used “extrapolation-by-waves” method for estimating nonresponse bias in surveys.

Bravo, Scott.

*****Update: What follows are more specifics about the challenge as posted here:

The general objective of the challenge is to promote the proper use of science in formulating public policy. This involves such things as full disclosure of forecasting methods and data, and the proper testing of alternative methods. A specific objective is to develop useful methods to forecast global temperatures. Hopefully other competitors would join to show the value of their forecasting methods. These are objectives that we share and they can be achieved no matter who wins the challenge.

Al Gore is invited to select any currently available fully disclosed climate model to produce the forecasts (without human adjustments to the model’s forecasts). Scott Armstrong’s forecasts will be based on the naive (no-change) model; that is, for each of the ten years of the challenge, he will use the most recent year’s average temperature at each station as the forecast for each of the years in the future. The naïve model is a commonly used benchmark in assessing forecasting methods and it is a strong competitor when uncertainty is high or when improper forecasting methods have been used.

Specifically, the challenge will involve making forecasts for ten weather stations that are reliable and geographically dispersed. An independent panel composed of experts agreeable to both parties will designate the weather stations. Data from these sites will be listed on a public web site along with daily temperature readings and, when available, error scores for each contestant.

Starting at the beginning of 2008, one-year ahead forecasts then two-year ahead forecasts, and so on up to ten-year-ahead forecasts of annual “mean temperature” will be made annually for each weather station for each of the next ten years. Forecasts must be submitted by the end of the first working day in January. Each calendar year would end on December 31.

The criteria for accuracy would be the average absolute forecast error at each weather station. Averages across stations would be made for each forecast horizon (e.g., for a six-year ahead forecast). Finally, simple unweighted averages will be made of the forecast errors across all forecast horizons. For example, the average across the two-year ahead forecast errors would receive the same weight as that across the nine-year-ahead forecast errors. This unweighted average would be used as the criterion for determining the winner.

Terms of the challenge can be modified by mutual agreement.

If Al Gore accepts the challenge, each party would invest $10,000 in a mutually agreed Charitable Trust stock account on December 1, 2007. The charity will receive the total value in the fund when the official award is made at the annual International Symposium on Forecasting in 2018. Should Scott Armstrong win, the gift would be made to the International Symposium on Forecasting, in Arlington, Virginia. Should Al Gore win, he will designate the charity.