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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."
50% change of loosing if 2008 was an average year...
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.
I'd be willing to bet that some rich conservative financed their bet, so that they didn't lose any money.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Remember, the republicans chose as their presidential nominee a man who claims that global warming is a hoax perpetuated by China to weaken our economy. These people have their heads so far up the rectums of the fossil fuel industry that they blather on about a "war on coal" and jumped Hillary's case when she talked about shutting down coal plants... not even for renewables, but for other fossil fuels (natural gas) that burn cleaner. They're so damned convinced that there are no repercussions to burning fossil fuels and dumping carbon into the atmosphere, so totally self-assured that there is no such thing as climate change, that even replacing the worst and dirtiest fossil fuel of them all with another fossil fuel is a matter of psychotic controversy for them. (Hell. If there's NOT a "war on coal", then there damn well should be!)
And when one of their own had the temerity to point out that even if you're 100% confident in your belief that the global climate has absolutely not changed, is not changing, and never will change, fossil fuels will still eventually run out, and that stubbornly clinging to them is like being "last horse and buggy salesman who was holding out as cars took over the roads" or "the last investor in Blockbuster as Netflix emerged"... when Arnold Schwarzenegger broke it down into pure, cold-blooded, capitalism snd pointed out that there is a lot of money to be made and a lot of jobs to be had in renewables and they've been great for California's economy (Now having nudged out France to become the 6th largest in the world... they branded him a traitor and have all but totally disavowed him.
The climate change deniers and fossil fuel fanboys are not rational actors, and they're not acting in good faith. Sadly, I think the only real thing to do is to wait for them to be demographiced out. And we'll just have to hope that, once their successors have taken power and cast them aside, it's not too late to repair the damage going forward from there.
Imagine all the people...
So according to you, physics is biased towards global govermental control. Some big cabale goes on in the background and manipulates the laws of physics to allow for a global catastrophic scenario, which in turn gives governments the power to reign in.
No, according to him we're already slaves to corporations... at least ever since 1987 when the "global government" banned CFC's because of that "ozone hole" thing. While the said ozone hole is actually closing now, this horrible, communistic global action has destroyed our very lifestyle.
No, wait. It hasn't.
Just because some random website claims something is true, doesn't actually make it true.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
When shitloads of physical evidence, on the other hand, confirms something - it's almost certainly much more likely to be true than not true - especially when the contrary position is supported by a massive, steaming heap of no evidence at all (otherwise known as pure bullshit).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
We're already betting our lives and the planet on it, how much do you plan to raise the stakes after that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yes, those 90+ percent of scientists who believe in AGW are all part of a shadowy global elite hell-bent on controlling us through fear! Good thing there are still those plucky young multi-billion dollar oil companies fighting for the little guy, making sure we can carry on paying them 1.2 trillion dollars per year so our lights don't go out!
Tell billions of screaming indians, chinese, and millions africans that they can't have jobs, ac, cars and western lifestyles and that they need to go back to subsitance farming.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
2015 was the year that proved to me that the data isn't accurate. We had one of the coldest springs I could remember. And I joked to my friends, no worries, it'll be claimed that it was the hottest on record. My friends laughed dismissively as we knew it was well below normal temperatures with the exception of a warm February.
Lo and behold, it was announced that 2015 was one of the hottest springs on record for the U.S. Now being the good student of the scientific method, I figured regional vs global here. Clearly, our region was well below normal temperatures. But I wagered the Southwest and pacific coast must have been warmer, and perhaps the south as well. But mid-atlantic to New England was clearly much colder than normal.
So I look at the data maps. And yes, there was a big hot blotch out westward. Just as I suspected. But then, they had my entire region in moderate red for elevated warmth. At this point, I am calling BS. Because we were well below normal temperatures for spring. In fact, I lost a crap ton of fruit crops due to extremely late and continual frosts.
So ya...I call BS on the data. It's not calibrated right.
Except that there is no physical evidence at all. "Global Average Temperature" is an ideological construct - there is no such thing in physical reality and if you knew the slightest thing about physics you would know how dumb of an idea it is. But then again, Einstein proved a hundred years ago that there was no such thing as time, and that hasn't made much of an impact on people, so I won't hold my breath.
The average global warming believer is just as primitive and ignorant as the average middle ages believer in the catholic church. Two stupid religions for the stupid people of two different eras.
"It's Science," "The Bible Says So," "99.9% of scientist agree" ... 99.9% of cardinals agree on the divinity of the Pope. The apocalypse is coming. Give us your money to atone for your sins.
Maybe you should try reading some history instead of science and you could figure this stuff out.
So according to that link extra mass causes an atmosphere to heat up, so if the Earth is getting warmer then logically it must have taken on more mass very recently. Care to show us where that extra mass is hiding?
That's a rather odd way to read the study. In fact, you've created a straw man that's irrelevant to the study entirely [SMH].
And if atmospheric composition doesn't matter, why is Venus 30x hotter than Earth when it only receives 2x the solar insolation and has slightly less mass?
Since the intensity of the Sun's radiation decreases with distance from it as 1 over r-squared, Venus receives (93/67.25) squared, or 1.91 times the power per unit area that Earth receives, on average.
Since the radiating temperature of an isolated body in space varies as the fourth-root of the power incident upon it, by the Stefan-Boltzmann law, the radiating temperature of Venus should be the fourth-root of 1.91 (or the square-root of 93/67.25) = 1.176 times that of the Earth. Furthermore, since the atmospheric pressure varies as the temperature, the temperature at any given pressure level in the Venusian atmosphere should be 1.176 times the temperature at that same pressure level in the Earth atmosphere, INDEPENDENT OF THE DIFFERENT LEVELS OF INFRARED ABSORPTION in the two atmospheres. In particular, the averaged temperature at 1000 millibars on Earth is about 15C = 288K, so the corresponding temperature on Venus, WITHOUT ANY GREENHOUSE EFFECT, should be 1.176 times that, or 339K. But this is just 66C, the temperature we actually find there from the temperature and pressure profiles for Venus.
We have to compare atmospheric temperatures at equal pressures in the two atmospheres, and when we do that we find the Venus atmospheric temperature is always just 17% higher than the corresponding (same pressure level) temperature in Earth's atmosphere -- and that essentially constant factor is due solely to the two planets' relative distances from the Sun, nothing else (in particular, not due to the great difference in the amount of carbon dioxide in the two atmospheres). The pressure on the surface of Venus there is far outside the range of Earth's atmospheric pressure. From the results of the comparison I have done, we can say that if Earth had much more atmosphere, so that its surface pressure was equal to Venus's surface pressure, then we would expect the 463C surface temperature of Venus to be 17% higher than the surface temperature of the Earth with that much atmosphere.
Not to mention we've known about Jupiter's internal heat source since 1969 [google.co.uk].
Yes, but now it can be precisely measured.
Yes that entire site is starting to sound like one big straw man isn't it? Or straw planet, perhaps?
No, but your initial characterization of it most certainly is exactly that. And you knocked down your straw man. Congrats!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The climate change proponents ask for a lot.
They ask us to decrease emissions, research carbon sequestration, and invest more in researching/exploiting renewable energy sources. Yeah, it costs money and sometimes comfort/convenience. How much do hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy cost? (Hint: $108b and $65b.) How much does a 1/2 meter or 1 meter rise in sea levels cost (billions to hundreds of billions, just for the U.S.). How much do forced migrations, famine, and war cost? Pay now or let your children pay later... either way nature can't be fooled.
There is virtually no investment of any kind in fusion research.
But there could be, if we were serious about addressing climate change. That could have been Bush's legacy, for instance, in a world where $2000b seems better spent on solving energy insecurity than bombing Muslims on the other side of the globe. And fusion is not our only option: smart grid, smart appliances, renewables, and good old fission are within our grasp. (Granted the NIMBY/anti-nuke groups aren't helping the big picture here.)
Governments are also not showing much interest in other possible ways of reducing climate change.
Voters haven't given them much reason to.
"The science" is actually a mass of utterly impenetrable papers - tens of thousands of them
You're complaining about too much science? After years of saying we need more research? That's rich.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
The climate change proponents
'Proponents'? Do you mean the scientists who are pointing out what's happening in the real world? Or the people who are suggesting we listen to the scientists and maybe decide on some action to solve the problem?
ask for a lot. They state they want hundreds of billions of dollars
They do? Who has asked for that much money, and when? Certainly not the scientists.
Some studies have calculated the cost of a few proposed solutions, which in some cases could cost that much over the next few decades. Though those same studies also showed that such action would save considerably more money than that too, over similar lengths of time.
although it is not clear what for.
Not clear to you, perhaps. The IPCC reports spell out the problem fairly clearly though, and you can read the above studies for some suggested solutions.
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
Unstated, because it's not true, and the only people stating it are spouting straw-man claims like this one.
No sci-fi energy sources are needed when the entire world's energy needs can be met by a fraction of the sunlight falling on the Sahara alone. We've long had the technology to collect this energy, distributed in numerous ways (solar, wind, wave etc) and places, and also to even out supply (through cross-linked grids and assorted storage solutions). By transitioning away from fossil fuels we can easily produce as much clean energy as needed for our populations, without the huge costs to our societies and the environment - and the resultant indirect costs to our economies. Again, check out the many studies that show this is not only completely practical but actually cheaper in the long run.
The only answer government seems to have is to raise taxes.
On whom? The fossil-fuel industries that have been offloading their massive external costs on to the rest of us for so long? Cry me a river. When they raise their prices, that will just encourage the clean (and thus untaxed) generators to scale up faster, and thus speed the transition. But even without a carbon price, this is already happening.
Other government proposals you seem to have missed are diverting subsidies to cleaner technologies, and stricter emissions limits to force polluters to clean up their acts. We could even just let the market take its course, which would work out in the end I'm sure - albeit at a much higher long-term cost to everyone, but that's still better than deliberately slowing our response by all this denial.
"The science" is actually a mass of utterly impenetrable papers
Stop projecting your own ignorance, and give up on the FUD attack. I don't see you bitching about how hard it is to understand quantum thermodynamics or general relativity, when those fields have also had massive impacts on our way of life. Maybe because, in those fields as well, the scientists are simply revealing the world's workings to us, and it's actually up to the rest of us what we do with that knowledge.
Conflating scientific results and political solutions is irrational. Instead of attempting to deny the problem and shoot the messenger, how about promoting a solution that fits better with your own political ideologies, if you don't like the suggestions so far? Keeping your head stuck firmly in the sand only ensures you get left behind as the world keeps changing.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?