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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."
Weather is extremely short term and location dependent. Climate is neither.
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...
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.
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