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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."
Why would I make a bet with the same people who are adjusting the temperature readings? It'd be like if the other guy flipped a coin, but then refused to show you what side came up, and just assured you that you lost.
50% change of loosing if 2008 was an average year...
... the comment section on this article will be filed with trolls and political shills from the left and right.
An el nino (not caused by humans) occurred that year and we are just now coming out of it.
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
If I read this right, they won their bet... It got hotter, but none of it was man made.
to see the Slashdot climate change denier comments
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It is NOT a conservative or liberal argument, it's an argument by globalists who want control. Fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, but the Government will save you if you just give up all your rights. What do you get? To be a slaves to the corporations who get permission to buy some of what those same corporations sell.
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.
If I lost you, read it again with Plato's "The Republic", and again with Quigley's "Tragedy and Hope", and again with "Propaganda" by Bernays, and eventually it will make sense. The blue prints and story have been out there for over 25 centuries, you should be angry that you don't see it.
Think!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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...
Create legal betting markets so that the ignorant can lose their money in a new way!
One more reason to keep the population stupid, scared and angry. As if there weren't enough already.
Should be pointed out the winner of the bet also betted against it getting warmer. Even he was not confident enough in his own statements that he hedged his bets
Doesn't anyone know that 2016 is a strong El Nino year? just like 2012 and 2008 The temperature variation this year is natural and has nothing to do with the CAGW theory. Anyone who doesn't know this and is trying to shakedown bet money should be tarred and feathered as a charlatan !
CAGW postulates that water vapor causes temperature rises as an enhanced effect over the known effect of CO2 (a logarithmic effect, where CO2 increases surface temperatures by 1.1 C per doubling of CO2). 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 - mostly because they completely fail to model the complex water vapor processes in the atmosphere. Hence, this prediction of CAGW is falsified, and as data is collected it is making the Null Hypothesis more and more probably (that is, human emitted CO2 is not the dominant controlling factor in terrestrial global warming, which started around 1850 at the end of the Little Ice Age as solar magnetic activity started increasing again and this has an effect on cloud formation mediated by the solar wind interacting with cosmic rays).
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.
If you are a Slashdotter who is interested in the climate system, but did not know these predictions of CAGW and how the empirical evidence falsifies the hypothesis at this time, then you need to do a lot more homework.
Oh, and I'm willing to take on and bet anyone that the CAGW hypothesis will remain falsified, because the observational evidence (that is, reality) is showing that the computer simulations of climate which the IPCC made its predictions on are diverging further and further from reality. So I'm glad to take money from suckers who don't understand the science and still believe in the falsified hypothesis of CAGW.
The contention isn't that global warming exists, it's that it's man made. Some people believe that it's just the natural cycle of the earth. Others who get grants to say it's man made think otherwise.
I don't see how £1,000 is losing big. The future of humanity and many other species are on the line. We're all going to lose big by extinction.
I love these kinds of deluded bets. Instead of betting if UNIPCC FAR's 'hot spot' over the equator works, lets bet if land based temperature sensors record a hotter temperature while being simultaneously heated by nearby air conditioners and the asphalt parking lot they are usually found with.
Meanwhile http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep... dropped demonstrating the air over land warms 3x faster than the ocean. So if the ocean covers 2/3 of the planet, and all temperature sensors are on asphalt, would you expect the "earths temperature" to be higher or lower?
Meanwhile has anyone figured out at what date the Guardian will run out of money? Science has never been as vicious and poisonous since the Guardian and green peace teamed up.
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:
He's pushing a very strange agenda with no reference to reality.
Good thing they didn't have to prove that humans caused that warming.
There are no climate contrarians - just people in differing stages of grief.
It's okay, be all angry, we understand.
"Between 2008 and 2015 there would be more than 0.1C of human-caused global warming..."
"2015 was a record-breaking hot year, about 0.32C hotter than 2008"
May we see the proof that it was human caused, please?
I am a firm believer that climate change happens, it is in the evidence scientists have dug up.
However, what proof do they have that this change is solely the result of human activity on the planet, and what control group are they using to show what would have happened had we not been here?
The foolishness of the bet comes not really from any climate-change denial nonesense, but just from random chance. Betting that any given year will be hotter or colder than any other given particular year is stupid, there's too much chance for something else to go wrong (from whatever your perspective). A better bet, if you're really looking to test the climate change bit, would have been something like "The 10 year period starting in January 2008 will be, on average, warmer than the 10 year period starting January 1998." The data on THAT would be way more interesting and useful to our purposes here.
Did they miss this? Might want to ask for their cash back if there was ever any real cash and this isn't just some story to get climate change in the news.
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.
but they are paid a lot more for the lying.
So this betting would be a good "put your money where your mouth is" way to shut some people up.
Who is starting the website?
Man made climate change is going to kill us all... blah blah blah
Give us lots of money and political power to remediate it. NOW... blah blah blah
In the end we'll have a Progressive Socialist utopia... blah blah blah
If you don't like it, we'll send you to re-education camps... blah blah blah
And if you still don't like it, we'll [insert socialist nightmare punishment here]
The man doesn't speak for *many* who traditionally aligned themselves as "Republican". (That's why you have the party imploding, and why it already split with the "Tea Party Republicans".)
Whether or not Trump gets elected to office, I think the party is pretty much done for. The only way it's getting salvaged is if a lot of the people who got disgusted with it and walked away, combined with the more "Centrist" or Libertarian members get together and revamp it.
When you talk to many of THOSE Republicans, they're not a fan of proposals like Obama's and Mrs. Clinton's attempts to end the coal industry -- but not because they deny climate change exists. They simply believe (as do I, actually) that the change needs to happen on its own -- not via government mandate/force. Because for one thing, you otherwise create a lot of collateral damage to our economy. Don't forget, for example, that our freight rail system transports more coal than almost anything else. If you eliminate the coal industry right now, you may as well also kill freight rail while you're at it. And THAT doesn't seem like a very environmentally sound move, since everything else carried by rail today would have to go by individual trucks instead. Plus, it puts the remaining coal miners out of work as well as the railroad workers. Those are two industries where you don't need a lot of formal education to earn a paycheck that can sustain a family. What's the plan for all of those displaced workers? Tell them all to become solar panel installers?!
IMO, what's not really very realistic is the posturing and "scare tactics" going on with climate change, that we must make drastic changes NOW or else risk dire consequences. In reality, the whole thing won't suddenly reverse itself after 200+ years of burning fossil fuels worldwide, just because in 2017, we mandate an end to much of it. The move to more environmentally-friendly or sustainable energy alternatives is marching forward, even if government takes a hands-off approach. Economics alone will dictate it as people see the alternatives as ways to cut their monthly energy bills. And as electric cars progress, you'll see more people opting for one regardless of environmental factors, simply because they like the reliability factor. (No more complicated transmission in them to break down? That's a pretty big advantage! No more need to worry about changing engine coolant or oil changes? Another improvement in ease of ownership for electric. And electric motors can provide loads of instantaneous torque, meaning they're ideal for performance cars.)
What these global warming fearmongerers just can't seem to wrap their heads around is that the temperature records have been compromised. For some time. For example, it took surfacestations.org to do the first actual physical survey of all the temp stations, and they found that 60% of them were installed incorrectly and yielding bad data. NASA last year eventually separated the datasets - a pristine one that has the "good stations", and a flawed one with the "bad stations". The pristine set shows no warming, the flawed one, does. Guess which one they used in their pronouncements of 2015 being the "warmest year on record"? And when 2015 still wasn't warm enough, Hansen decided to fold in ocean temp data prior to 2012, to knock those years lower. That's why the graphs for "2010 being the hottest year on record) are different than the 2010 graphs included in the "2015 is the hottest year ever". They keep moving the goalposts, massaging data, and ignoring the inherent problems with the data. This is why all the raw data streams from the satellites do not show any warming for the last 17 years...but the released dataset, does. (Never mind the fact the utter uselessness of simply taking an average temp of the planet - it's a far more complex system than that math would allow for.) All it takes for anyone to realize this, is simply to pay attention. That's it. I've been studying this literally since 1998; and it's been one fraud after another.
Sounds like another publicity stunt used to promote an agenda. I sincerely doubt anyone bet real money or won/lost anything. It's like me saying I bet my friend $1000 that Hillary could go a whole day without lying and then reporting to the press that I lost my bet.
How is it that simply not wanting something to be true can make people go blind and immune to truth and facts? I wonder if there is any hope for humanity.
President Obama's science advisor, John Holdren (co-author of infamous sky-is-falling and we're all going to end up eating each other author Paul Ehrlich) once famously lost a bet over his insistence that the planet was running out of raw materials.
If we are to draw from this new bet the lesson that man-made global warming is a real and present danger requiring huge upsets in economies and such, and further, that people opposed to every detail of the Al Gore hype must be presumed wrong and evil, then surely Holdren's loss means that Holdren and all the people who believe like him including Obama should all be ignored and seen as wrong and evil.......right?
silly me. I'm for being consistent. I'd make a very poor political party-first uber alles hack.
These bets are stupid, and no matter who wins they are used to fool idiots into believing they provide reinforcement for one side or the other in some scientific or economic or other field that requires more then 5 minutes to understand. They are publicity stunts and are usually only proof of who is better at selecting betting criteria, like WICH raw materials to bet on, the timeframe of the bet, what global parameter/s (in this case the completely arbitrary "global temperature") how to measure it (in this case, the advocates of AGW select all the temp station locations, data weights, "calibrations" etc) and so on.
That whole argument of a need to "account for externalities" is questionable, IMO.
It sounds like a rational argument for carbon taxes and the like, with that explanation that the free marketplace failed to account for those things, so it fills in that gap.
But traditionally, these "external factors" were never accounted for, because they involve basic resources on the planet that are accessible and shared by everyone, and essentially viewed as "free". I'm not sure that there's really any way to calculate the correct "cost" of using any of them that isn't biased towards certain individuals?
I mean, should we start applying a tax to everyone who grows crops or a garden for "soil nutrient depletion"? Once you start with the concept, where does it end? I think you'd have to logically extend it to all sorts of things.... (Heck, they tried this up here in Maryland, with a "rain tax" that made you pay based on how much impermeable surface you owned on your land. The argument was, you were negatively impacting the environment if the rain water couldn't soak into the ground in any place you constructed something or paved over some soil, so you needed to pay compensation for doing it. It was VERY unpopular and got repealed.)
With ANY of these situations, there's no agreement on what you're really costing "future generations" by taking actions that manipulate the environment around you. I think the free marketplace handles this by letting people deal with any consequences as they arise and impede progress. Maybe that's more "reactionary" than you'd ideally like? But it ensures we aren't duped into wasting huge sums of money on false solutions to problems. If we took all the fossil fuels offline right now, we'd lose so much energy generation capacity, it would put us in a really bad position to move forward to solve the climate change issues.