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Climate Change Contrarians Lose Big Betting Against Global Warming (theguardian.com)

Layzej writes: Two members of the Global Warming Policy Foundation academic advisory board have each lost [roughly $1,320 (1,000 British Pound)] betting that 2015 would not be warmer than 2008. The Guardian reports: "Between 2008 and 2015 there would be more than 0.1C of human-caused global warming, so for 2015 to be cooler would have required a huge La Nina event, or big volcanic eruption, or perhaps the contrarians were banking on human-caused global warming being wrong. Whatever their reasoning, it was a foolish bet to make. 2015 was a record-breaking hot year, about 0.32C hotter than 2008. It wasn't even close." The winner of the bet, economist Chris Hope, also discussed the possibility of implementing climate betting markets, and noted: "they could offer a financial incentive for people who disagree about the likelihood of climate change to carefully assess the risks, instead of just shouting their disagreement across the void. If we do nothing, all the signs are that dangerous climate change is one of the safest bets around."

9 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Problem being by Sique · · Score: 3, Informative

    But even 2011 (a strong La Nina, thus the contrary of an El Nino) was hotter than 2008.

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    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  2. Re: Stupid bet... by Jzanu · · Score: 5, Informative

    Location is precise. Climates apply to regions. Global climate applies to the entire world, and involves net energy absorbed.

  3. Context - 9/11 was a hoax guy by dbIII · · Score: 5, Informative
    Readers the post above can be better understood if you look back at his earlier posts about world government control and how 9/11 was a hoax.
    His bits about the Pentagon crash being entirely faked with no aircraft involved and a building being deliberately blown up (instead of being burnt down due to thousands of gallons of fuel splashing about) will especially enlighten where he is coming from.

    He used his HR granted title of "engineer" to a leading hand in SOFTWARE with no project to lead and no subordinates as "proof" that he knew about civil engineering and that steel doesn't get soft in fires.
    His lines above such as the following make perfect sense in that context:

    The proposed cure for Global warming is to massively tax the populace. No plans to clean up, no infrastructure to replace what gets lost in massive taxes, but a few people sure as hell get richer

    He's pushing a very strange agenda with no reference to reality.

  4. Re:Has nobody heard of El Nino ? by Kiuas · · Score: 5, Informative

    The computer simulations suggest that water vapor should increase temperatures by around 4 C.The computer simulations suggest that water vapor should increase temperatures by around 4 C. Yet the latest measurement of this (the 'Transient Climate Sensitivity') show the computer simulations don't match reality

    This is incorrect

    There are two ways of working out what climate sensitivity is. The first method is by modelling:

    Climate models have predicted the least temperature rise would be on average 1.65C (2.97F) , but upper estimates vary a lot, averaging 5.2C (9.36F). Current best estimates are for a rise of around 3C (5.4F), with a likely maximum of 4.5C (8.1F).

    The second method calculates climate sensitivity directly from physical evidence, by looking at climate changes in the distant past:

    These calculations use data from sources like ice cores to work out how much additional heat the doubling of greenhouse gases will produce. These estimates are very consistent, finding between 2 and 4.5C global surface warming in response to doubled carbon dioxide.

    All the models and evidence confirm a minimum warming close to 2C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 with a most likely value of 3C and the potential to warm 4.5C or even more.

    Granted, you didn't specify wat exactly do you mean by 'latest' here, the PALEONSENS study ('Making sense of palaeoclimate sensitivity', from Nature, link can be found in the article) is from 2012. If you have some newer peer reviewed research showing these types of results are somehow false, please link them and don't just state these things as if they're facts.

    Furthermore CAGW makes the specific prediction that the Lower Tropical Troposphere temperatures will increase faster than the Earth's surface temperatures - yet not only is this not seen, the opposite is seen by all measurements, including our most reliable ones, the RSS and UAH satellites (and corroborated by thousands of weather balloon samples). Again this falsifies the CAGW Hypothesis.

    This is incorrect

    The MSU satellite data is collected from a number of satellites orbiting & providing daily coverage of some 80% of the Earth's surface. Each day the orbits shift and 100% coverage is achieved every 3-4 days. The microwave sensors on the satellites do not directly measure temperature, but rather radiation given off by oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. The intensity of this radiation is directly proportional to the temperature of the air and is therefore used to estimate global temperatures.

    There are also differences between the sensors that were onboard each satellite and merging this data to one continuous record is not easily done. It was nearly 13 years after the original papers that the adjustments that Christy and Spencer originally applied were found to be incorrect. Mears et al. (2003) and Mears et al. (2005).

    When the correct adjustments to the data were applied the data matched much more closely the trends expected by climate models. It was also more consistent with the historical record of troposphere temperatures obtained from weather balloons. As better methods to adjust for biases in instruments and orbital changes have been developed, the differences between the surface temperature record and the troposphere have steadily decreased.

    At least two other groups keep track of the tropospheric temperature using satellites and they all now show warming in the troposphere that is consistent with the surface temperature record. Furthermore data also shows now that the stratosphere is cooling as predicted by the physics.

    All three groups measuring temperatures of the troposphere show a warming trend. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program produced a study (

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    "It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
  5. Re:I'm just here by johannesg · · Score: 3, Informative

    Very well.

    - The climate change proponents ask for a lot. They state they want hundreds of billions of dollars, although it is not clear what for. They leave unstated that the only way humanity can continue to live at its current level of development, is to either develop a source of energy that is as of yet still science fiction (fusion), or to vastly reduce the number of humans on the planet, or to vastly reduce the energy usage per human - i.e. return to the lifestyle of the 19th century.

    - There is virtually no investment of any kind in fusion research. If it were tackled like the Manhattan program or the moon landing we could have workable fusion in a decade, but fusion research remains at minimal funding levels and remains forever on the far horizon. Of the alternatives, fission is voted down on account of being "too scary", and renewables remain marginal and unreliable. Again, there is no serious investment: governments hand out a bit of subsidy and hope for the best.

    - Governments are also not showing much interest in other possible ways of reducing climate change. Are American cities being remodelled with a focus on less driving? Has the EU stopped its wasteful (and easily eliminated) trekking back and forth to Strassburg? Is _anything_ being done to stop the massive overpopulation of the planet? No - and in fact governments (at least in Europe) _want_ more people, terrified as they are of their populations shrinking. The only answer government seems to have is to raise taxes. That is suspiciously convenient.

    - "The science" is actually a mass of utterly impenetrable papers - tens of thousands of them, all refering to each other, and usually without complete data sets. Almost no one can read and understand them all. For interpretation we therefore rely on gate keepers, who reduce those trillions of data points to a single sound byte. We have to rely on the judgement of a handful of completely unknown people, for choices that will completely change our planet and our way of life. These people literally have the power to shape the world in their image, and we have no idea what agenda they might have.

    So there you have it. The people with the power to change things do not seem to give a fuck, and the only thing they are interested in is reducing the rest of humanity to a standard of living last seen before electricity became a thing. Please do excuse me for being sceptical...

  6. Re:Has nobody heard of El Nino ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Skeptical Science is a propaganda website promoting a political agenda. I wish people would stop citing it. They look worse than the idiots citing Red State.

  7. Re:Stupid bet... by silentcoder · · Score: 3, Informative

    Climate, while much simpler than weather, is still rather more complicated than school grades.
    So 100% accurate ? No. But not 50% either - more in the 95%+ range. That's also not an entirely true assessment because you're measuring it the wrong way. Climate models are written by experts who are aware they can't factor in everything, and that some things are still being worked on, so they don't give you an exact temperature - they give you a range within which the outcome is likely to lie and, if you take the average over the period predicted for, they overwhelmingly do lie in those averages.

    The one major discrepency is IPCC reports, there are several decades where the average warming was significantly higher than IPCC models predicted. The reason for this is that the IPCC is particularly conservative in their estimates, fear of being called alarmists have led to the IPCC only publishing the bottom end of the likely range and also excluding anything they don't have extremely high confidence in (far higher than any other science would need for a minor variable in a big set with limited influence) - as a result they tend to to somewhat under-predict warming.

    The lesson from that is that IPCC reports should be read as an absolute best-case scenario, reading the papers they are based on - the upper limit worst-case scenarios should be considered as well and we can generally expect reality to lie somewhere in the middle between those.,

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    Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
  8. Re:Has nobody heard of El Nino ? by Kiuas · · Score: 3, Informative

    Know who you are citing. Skeptical Science is not trustworthy.

    Be the background and education of the founder what they may, the point is the arguments made by OP are not supported by peer reviewed science. That is, the veracity of the studies and results which point to OP being wrong - are not dependent on the credentials of whoever founded the blog because he has had no part in said studies. He claimed UAH satellites show the stratosphere is not warming, and I pointed out that UAH itself has explicitly said this is not the case. here's the link to the paper itself.

    So, if the articles quoted and mentioned which refute OPs claims are not accurate, I ask you and other to link to peer reviewed papers showing that to be the case, because pointing out that whoever started the blog isn't very good at math has absolutely no relevance to the veracity of the actual scientific papers mentioned.

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    "It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
  9. Re:Fool and his money are soon parted by randallman · · Score: 4, Informative

    I checked out the second article and followed the sources. The root source was http://ufosightingshotspot.blo.... What a crock.

    And from the first article you linked to: "one scientist's controversial theory" That says it all. If it had merit, other scientists would follow up.

    The people who SHOULD be embarassed are the ones yelling "hoax" and screaming "government grants" and "government conspiracy", while ignoring the largest and biggest financial interests, oil and gas. Unfortunately, in a country where Donald Trump can be a presidential contender, who knows. When the denial finally ends, they'll probably just blame Obama like they do for everything else.