Forecasting Expert J. Scott Armstrong

J. Scott Armstrong (born March 26, 1937) is an author, forecasting and marketing expert, and a professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2007, Armstrong made headlines by challenging Al Gore to a $10,000 bet on yearly temperatures, which he refers to as "The Global Warming Challenge". He has also testified before Congress on flaws in forecasts of polar bear populations.

Armstrong is the co-founder of the site advertisingprinciples.com, which in 2004, won the MERLOT award for best business education site.

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

When we inspected the 17 [forecasting] 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 Galvin 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.

Marketing and Advertising
Armstrong's book Persuasive Advertising: Evidence-based Principles was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010. In it, Armstrong presents 194 principles designed to increase the persuasiveness of advertisements. The principles were derived from empirical data, expert opinion, and observation. They are organized and indexed under ten general principles (e.g. emotion, attention), and those ten principles are further grouped into three categories: strategy, general tactics, and media-specific tactics.

In 1989, a University of Maryland study ranked Professor Armstrong among the top 15 marketing professors in the U.S. based on a study using peer ratings, citations, and publications. He serves or has served on editorial positions for the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of Business Research, Interfaces, and other journals. He was awarded the Society for Marketing Advances Distinguished Scholar Award for 2000.

Armstrong's works are frequently cited; his "first-author" citation rate currently averages over 200 per year.
Armstrong has received the MERLOT Award for Exemplary Online Learning Resources as "Best Internet Site in Business Education" for 2004.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Scott_Armstrong

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Footnote on Scott Armstrong and Global
Warming by the Blog Author
Armstrong and Green audited the IPCC 2007 report for compliance with established forecasting standards. IPCC assured readers the earth was certain to face a century of warming. Examining the forecasting standards independently from each other, Armstrong and Green found with respect to IPCC2007 chapter 8:

"Audit of IPCC Chapter 8• Of the 140 principles in the ForecastingAudit, we judged 127 relevant.  Each author rated the forecasting methods independently, then we resolved differences

• We were able to rate 89 principles of which 72 principles were violated"

-- http://ff.org/images/stories/sciencecenter/armstrong_presentation.pdf

There are two logical responses possible to this independent, non-governmental finding. A) throw out the global warming study of IPCC 2007 because it broke too many forecasting standards. B) Explain why IPCC 2007 is not a forecast but some other dependable method of making a very long range prediction.

In the absence of B (which has not been asserted anywhere by anyone in defense of IPCC 2007), the blog author very strongly recommends that IPCC2007 not be used to make any public policy nor governmental policy decisions.