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."

Comments

Re: Stupid bet...

[Jzanu]

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

Context - 9/11 was a hoax guy

[dbIII]

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.

Re:Has nobody heard of El Nino ?

[Kiuas]

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 (