Month 11, Day 19: An Insult To Douchenozzles Everywhere

The Wall Street Journal prints a letter from a well-known denier, J. Scott Armstrong, a marketing/forecasting maven from Pennsylvania.

Bjorn Lomborg (“Can Anything Serious Happen in Cancun?”, op-ed, Nov. 12) claims that government spending on global warming policies is wasted, but he assumes that global warming caused by carbon dioxide is a fact. It is not. We base this statement not on the opinions of 31,000 American scientists who signed a public statement rejecting this warming hypothesis (the “Oregon Petition”), but rather because the forecasts of global warming were derived from faulty procedures.

We published a peer-reviewed paper showing that the forecasting procedures used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change violated 72 of 89 relevant principles (e.g., “provide full disclosure of methods”). The IPCC has been unable to explain why it violated such principles. In response, we developed a model that follows the principles. Because the climate is complex and poorly understood, our model predicts that global average temperatures will not change.

Inspired by his letter, I did some research on the guy. What a douchenozzle.

J. Scott Armstrong’s letter very admirably states a goal: fact-based, science-based policy, which is something to which any and all governments should aspire. But Mr. Armstrong’s panegyric to factuality is larded with misleading statements and damning omissions. His apophatic reference to the so-called “Oregon Petition” and its thirty-one thousand signatures fails to note that the document in question has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked. It would be naive to expect him to note the results of his 2007 “Global Warming Challenge” to Al Gore (in which he famously wagered ten thousand dollars that global mean temperatures wouldn’t rise): his own website conveniently stopped noting monthly outcomes in March of this year after the earth obstinately kept on getting hotter and hotter. Mr. Armstrong’s background in marketing is hardly relevant to his understanding of climate — and his disingenuous phraseology is an insult to the scientific integrity he purports to uphold.

Warren Senders