Scott Armstrong; liar, fraud, "scientific forecaster"

We haven't checked in in some time on Scott Armstrong's "scientific forecast" that global temperatures will remain unchanged for ten years, or his fake "bet" with Al Gore that no warming will occur. After losing eleven of the twelve months of 2010, something Armstrong avoided talking about by simply declining to update his own site, Armstrong, a professor of marketing who styles himself a "scientific forecaster," started to seem just too pathetic to pick on.

The recent La Nina, however, seems to have roused Armstrong from his self-imposed blog stupor long enough to fake the background of his "challenge":



Armstrong has been counting monthly anomalies as "wins" if they are no warmer than 2008, and "losses" (he rarely talks about these) if they are closer to an inflated trend of 0.3C/decade, which he falsely attributes to Gore.

The "bet" has not gone well for Armstrong. But Armstrong has been busy re-writing history. You will notice to the right on the chart above that Armstrong has deleted the first five months of 2008, presumably to disappear the La Nina-influenced depression in temperatures and hide the fact that counting from January 2008 (when the anomaly was -0.3C in UAH 5.3, compared to +0.32C last month -- hey +0.6C warming in just three and a half years!*), Armstrong has lost every single month of his bogus "bet."

La Nina is over, so it's no surprise that the June UAH anomaly of +0.32C is absent from Armstrong's site. I suppose when you've "disappeared" half a year of temperatures from a three-and-a-half year record, ignoring the present is no big deal.

* This is why serious people use moving averages, or at worst, yearly anomalies, not month-to-month fluctuations, to track global warming. To quote myself: "You could set up this bet in a more honest, evenhanded way which might be semi-valid in terms of shedding light on what is happening with our climate. Needless to say, that's not the process Armstrong came up with, which makes it all the more amusing that he has managed to deal himself a losing hand from a stacked deck."