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Mainstream Scientists Cashing In On Climate Wagers (reuters.com)

Layzej writes: Climate contrarians have long predicted imminent global cooling. A few have been willing to place wagers that mainstream scientists have been quick to accept. Often acceptance of the bet is followed by immediate retraction, as was the case when "Bastardi's Wager" was accepted by Joseph Romm or when Maurice Newman's $10,000 bet was accepted by physicist Brian Schmidt. In some cases, bets have been formalized and the terms of many of those wagers are coming to a close. It may not be surprising to learn that those who put their money on the side of mainstream science are the ones who are cashing in.

Reuters reports that British climate expert Chris Hope just won a 2,000 pound sterling ($2,830) wager made five years ago against two members of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, who had bet Hope that the Earth would be cooling by now. They also highlight a $10,000 bet made in 2005 between British climate modeler James Annan and two Russian solar physicists. The solar physicists had counted on waning solar output to halt warming. Annan will win if average global temperatures from 2013-17 are warmer than 2003-07. "Things are looking good for my bet," Annan said.

Keith Pickering reports on a series of three bets between Brian Schmidt and climate contrarian David Evans, who also believed that diminishing solar output would dominate the temperatures of the last decade and beyond. The wagers pay out in 2019, 2024, and 2029. Pickering concludes, "What Evans apparently doesn't realize is that because of the thermal inertia of the oceans, within narrow bounds we can already predict what global temperatures will be in 2019, 2024, and 2029. And David Evans is going to lose his shirt."

21 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Never give a sucker by NEDHead · · Score: 3, Insightful

    an even bet

  2. Silliness by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That is like betting on how long it is going to take the Titanic to sink, while you are ON the Titanic.

    1. Re:Silliness by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, some people on the sinking boat are still betting on wether or not the boat is sinking.

    2. Re:Silliness by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      True, but there's a certain amount of schadenfreude involved in forcing these idiots to put their money where their mouths are.

    3. Re: Silliness by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A far more apt analogy would be that some people are betting that the ship will rise into the air, science be damned!

    4. Re: Silliness by Frankzy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Gravity is just a theory anyway"

  3. I do this for football. by CajunArson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, totally made a killing when I bet that the Chiefs would take out the Patriots last week.

    All I had to do was apply a few post-game corrections to the score and the money just flowed right in.

    --
    AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
  4. A fool and his money... by babymac · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...are soon parted.

    --
    "War makes me sad." - Me
  5. That was pretty stupid. by BStroms · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't know about the others, but I can see at least with Bastardi's Wager, they went with satellite data. That proved to be wise in retrospect. As regardless of which you use, lower troposphere satellite data has shown much less warning than the land/sea models used by the NOAA and the like. For them, 2015 was the third warmest year, and 2010 and champion 1998.

    To actually make wagers expecting cooling seems extreme. Why not simply bet that warming would come in far short of the predictions mainstream scientists were putting out at the time? Maybe they couldn't get anyone to bite on those terms, maybe they were just that cocky, or most likely, they just wanted the media from putting money up predicting cooling.

    Whatever the reason, if they'd wagered on more sane "you're models show too much warming" terms, they could have made some good money.

    1. Re:That was pretty stupid. by KeensMustard · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Whatever the reason, if they'd wagered on more sane "you're models show too much warming" terms, they could have made some good money.

      Except nobody would take that bet, because mathematically, it is always 50/50. A model will always predict higher or lower than the actual outcome. It will be one or the other, and actually it doesn't matter which, as long as the model correctly predicts within a useful percentile. Also the bet is meaningless: you could make a wager on something meaningful ("the average temperature between 2010 and 2020 will be within the error bands of model x") - in which case, for any GCM model (or later) the contrarians are on track to lose (again).

    2. Re:That was pretty stupid. by quantaman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why not simply bet that warming would come in far short of the predictions mainstream scientists were putting out at the time? Maybe they couldn't get anyone to bite on those terms, maybe they were just that cocky, or most likely, they just wanted the media from putting money up predicting cooling.

      Whatever the reason, if they'd wagered on more sane "you're models show too much warming" terms, they could have made some good money.

      Probably rhetoric. The contrarians are building their reputation on the idea that the scientists are incompetent, corrupt, or in some other way completely wrong. If the contrarians are right then the current warm temps are just the high point of a cycle, so in a few years it should be cooler.

      By betting that temperatures will rise, just not quite as much as the scientists claim, they'd be essentially conceding that they think AGW is happening.

      Besides, they already benefited by cashing in on the PR of actually making bet, the fact the eventually lost isn't really something they'll be motivated to share with their followers.

      --
      I stole this Sig
  6. Re:"Climate contrarians" by gurps_npc · · Score: 5, Insightful
    What's going is we are trying really hard not to call you

    Morons who don't understand basic math, record keeping, science, logic.

    We tried climate skeptics, but you complained. So we moved to deniers and you complained again, like a little whiny Trump.

    As for your references to what we call climate change, again, one of those terms is 50 year old reference, the rest are names YOU made up and insisted we use.

    We can only bend over backwards to help you out so many times.

    You asked about what the temperature is supposed to be. The answer to that is simple.

    We are talking about a SMALL change - 2 degrees Celsius in the next century. That can have a huge impact. Because it is so small, most people don't notice it. It's not enough to be visible and you should not notice it. Note, the world has already experienced a 1 degree Celsius change over the past 100 years.

    But 1 degree Celsius is real, easily measurable, and our best projections show it will be at LEAST 2 degrees in 100 more years, possibly as much as 5 degrees. Now, even 5 degrees won't be enough to stop snow from falling most places. But it will be enough to melt large portions of the ice on Greenland and Antarctica, rising sea level enough to flood most major costal cities, where most of the wealth in the world currently resides.

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
  7. Sounds good, but devil is in details by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It depends which temperature record you are using. The Satellite records are better quality, as they cover the entire Earth evenly with a single instrument, all measurements taken at the same time of day using the same method, and so on. So there is nothing to adjust. Using any combination of those high-quality records, 2015 is about the 3rd warmest year they have seen, behind the previous El Nino year of 1994, IMS. So don't lose sight of the real long-term trend, which may still be downward. Picking the highest year of this cycle isn't a very good comparison.

    1. Re:Sounds good, but devil is in details by Layzej · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I think the problem is that it is not true. Carl Mears who develops the RSS satellite record says "they are not thermometers in space. The satellite [temperature] data ... were obtained from so-called Microwave Sounding Units (MSUs), which measure the microwave emissions of oxygen molecules from broad atmospheric layers. Converting this information to estimates of temperature trends has substantial uncertainties."

      Here are the adjustments on satellite data: http://www.skepticalscience.co...

  8. Re:"Climate contrarians" by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oh look: moron alert!

    going from global cooling

    You've latched on to an old thing that was reported in the popular press decades ago and never widely accepted by mainstream science. This identifies you as an idiot who clearly has a strong opinion but has not lifted a finger to find out the actual truth behind it.

    to global warming

    Global warming means the earth is getting hotter.

    anthropomorphic global warming,

    This means people are causing the earth to get hotter.

    to climate change,

    The earth warming will cause the climate to change.

    How is that so hard to understand?

    climate weirding

    I'm pretty sure you just made that up or got it off someone's tumblr pages.

    I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what the temperature is supposed to be.

    No you're not.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  9. Re:"Climate contrarians" by GodelEscherBlecch · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Oh my, so many confusing terms! Surely they all refer to the exact same thing and were made by the exact same people for the sole purpose of running a long con, and their mere existence debunks the science of the people who are neither of the above, right? Also, somebody call physics and tell them we are on to their game. Which is it nerds: standard model, supersymmetry, strings, multiverse? You're all full of shit!

  10. Re:Predicting the future.... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    global warming *cough* "Climate Change"

    The warming of the earth causes the climate to change. Why do the nutjobs think they've stumbled on a deep conspiracy when they discover two different terms for different aspects of the same thing?

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  11. Dumbass Bets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Of course it's getting warmer, we're still coming out of an ice age. The question isn't whether it's getting warmer or not, it's whether man is accelerating it.

    1. Re:Dumbass Bets by riverat1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm getting tired of the "Of course it's getting warmer, we're still coming out of an ice age." argument. It just shows how little you've really looked in to the situation. If you did you would know that temperatures during the current interglacial were highest 6,000-8,000 years ago during the Holocene climatic optimum and have been slowly cooling ever since as you would expect from the slow changes in Milankovitch cycles. It's only recently that temperatures took a sharp upward trajectory.

  12. Re:Predicting the future.... by SoftwareArtist · · Score: 1, Insightful

    You can create a predictive model by retro-fitting current observations to past data, looking at trends and making certain assumptions, but it's still only a model. Such a model can be used, but it should never be "believed".

    There's a pen sitting on my desk. I'm going to make a prediction: if I pick it up, then release it, it will fall back down again. But remember, I don't know. Predicting the future is not science. I just have a model based on past data and making certain assumptions. Such models can be used, but they should never be believed.

    Ok, let's try it and see. Here goes...

    Oh look! It fell! What a surprise! Isn't it amazing I got that right, even though my prediction was not based on science and there was no reason to believe it?

    --
    "I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
  13. Re:"Climate contrarians" by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Insightful

    To warm the atmosphere of an entire planet by even a fraction of a degree man's massive amounts of energy are being trapped. At the moment the oceans are acting as a massive heat sink, at some considerable effect to ocean ecosystems, but that capacity is going to decrease and sooner or later the lower atmosphere and surface temperatures will begin showing of qreater temperatures. We will have permafrost melting and releasing methanez exacerbating the situation.

    The simple fact, known for over a century, is that CO2 traps solar radiation. It isn't the least bit controversial.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.