Slashdot Mirror
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.
It's all a plot, and everybody is in on it except you.
But even 2011 (a strong La Nina, thus the contrary of an El Nino) was hotter than 2008.
Why wouldn't I take that bet and place explosive charges around Mt. Pinatubo? Pets Siamese cat.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
OK, you sprung us, we've all been colluding behind your back in one great big conspiracy the whole time. At the start we just wanted to play a silly gag about being descended from apes (evolution, even the name is silly), but you were so easy to trick we had to go again. So we upped the stakes with the whole "spherical world" theory... and you believed us! I mean come on, WTF did you think was stopping all the people in the so-called "southern hemisphere" from falling right off??? But you swallowed it! Seriously, keeping a straight face whenever we saw you was almost impossible! So after all of that how could we resist a bit of fun with the climate stats?
Anyhow, sorry for the embarrassment - you must be feeling rather silly right now. We promise we'll let you in on the gag next time.
signed
the mysterious "them"
Location is precise. Climates apply to regions. Global climate applies to the entire world, and involves net energy absorbed.
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.
You can have 2 different locations which have the same climate experiencing different weather.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
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
The difference between predicting weather and predicting climate is about the same than predicting the results of the next NBA round, and predicting which team will make it to the play-offs.
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.
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.
Modded -1: Trump
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 you are boiling water, if you know how much heat you are putting into the water, you can estimate how fast the water will boil but you will not know where and when each steam bubble appears.
No, we took a vote, and he DEFINITELY will not be in on the next gag.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
This is incorrect
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.
This is incorrect
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
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 *
Weather is very difficult, climate is comparatively much easier.
Because climate is an average - and averages are far easier to predict than specific individual cases.
If I draw the name of a random American school kid from a hat and ask you to predict their final grades this year... you have roughly a zero chance of getting it right.
If I ask you to predict their GPA and you bet on '3' (the average) you have much better (but still high) odds.
If I ask you to predict the distribution of grades for all graduating students this year and you have even a modicum of understanding of statistics you can bet on 'a normal distribution pattern' (that is roughly 25% fail, in the average pass range and 25% with A's) then you have 100% chance of being right - in fact, we are SO certain that this average MUST hold in any fair exam that if the grades FAIL to line up to a normal distribution that's sufficient evidence to criminally convict teachers or administrators of cheating !
So why can I predict the average scores for a class or a country with 100% success rates with no other information, and yet have near-zero chance of predicting a particular student's grades without a LOT of other information ?
Because average are much, much more predictable than the instances they are averages off.
Climate is an average of weather over a long time. Climate, as an average, is therefore much, much more predictable than weather.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And somehow there are still people who feel climate change is not a problem...
It's not "somehow". It's cognitive dissonance.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I thought the past tense of "bet" was: "Aw geez, Guido's going to be after me with a baseball bat again."
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Of course we've heard of the El Nino. The El Nino, the Pinto, and the Santa Mary were the three ships Jesus used to bring his dinosaurs to the US to set up his all white gun club.
I get it, you didn't give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, and you're certainly not giving up now.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
It was, as per the article, there was a good explanation of it: a particularly well developed La Nina was able to (briefly) have a stronger effect cooling than greenhouse gasses had heating. The deniers were betting that, rather than an isolated event, it was proof of the overall pattern being wrong and that the temperatures would keep dropping.
Even if the La Nina had held out, which it didn't, this would not have been the case.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
> But because anthropogenesis is a sham.
Humans creating life is a sham ? Spoken like a true virgin.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Agreed.
My preferred bet would have been, "Are there more or fewer people recorded living in the zip codes of the Florida Keys during the 2020 census than there were during the 2010 census?"
The criteria for settling the bet needs to be something much more objective than highly variable and easily manipulable temperature data. Global Warming could be complete bunk, and these guys could have still lost the bet due to nothing more than yearly variation in temperature. They choose their bet poorly.
If your inhaler has high fructose corn syrup in it, it may in fact be candy and not a medical device FYI
What's wrong with your parser that it can't tell the difference between a capital and lowercase S? That seems like an odd bug.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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!
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.
what control group are they using to show what would have happened had we not been here?
Ah yes, if only scientists had created a control planet before the industrial revolution so we could compare what the effect of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration by 33% is, oh well guess we can't do anything about it because we're only 90+ percent sure not 110% percent sure. Also fossil fuel exhaustion and pollution, well those don't matter either!
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...
... the comment section on this article will be filed with trolls and political shills from the left and right.
Just this once, can't we have a large-scale scientific issue characterized by science and fixed by engineers?
We're only halfway through the 2010's, but the signs so far indicate that it would take an overwhelming global cooling over the next 3.5 years for this to be a losing bet.
There are many graphs that one could choose from, but I'll just use this one from NOAA. The 1910s were all 0.2 - 0.3 celcius below the average for the 20th century. The 2010s (so far) have all been about 0.6 celcius higher. 2016 is looking to be a banner year.
So as it stands, the 2010s are already about 0.9 celcius higher than the 1910s, nearly double the half-a-degree mark. In order for one to lose this bet, the next few years would have to be below-average. Given the tremendous inertia of the global climate, I think it would take a modest nuclear winter, or a handful of Pinatubo-like volcanic eruptions, for this to happen. I'd happily take that bet.
Though, given that it's an election year, that nuclear winter is still a possibility.
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.
Actually - those regions are mostly using renewables already and expanding their use far faster than the US is - I live in Africa.
Not least because it's cheaper when you're adding new capacity (which is what they mostly do).
Electricity is compared using something called Levelized Cost Per KW/H - which is a price worked out for the supply source, that includes the cost of construction to recoup, fuel and maintenance costs etc. etc.
There was such a comparison done in South Africa just this week - here are the numbers:
New nuclear: best case scenario R1.30 per kw/h, more realistic number (using the fuel and maintenance costs of existing nuclear supplies and not assuming new nuclear will be cheaper) R1.50
New coal: between R1.05 and R1.19 depending on the capacity of the generator.
Solar: R0.87
Wind: R0.52
Notice how the cost for wind is roughly 1/3rd the realistic rate for nuclear, and less than half the best rate for coal ? So building coal and nuclear is fundamentally stupid and happens exclusively where massive corruption is involved.
It's arguable how well renewables compare with fossil fuels in established markets like the USA where lots of long-paid-off fossil fuel capacity exist, but it's no contest in emerging markets where new electricity generators have to be built and the construction costs factored into the retail price.
And that's without even considering time as a major factor. The earliest timeline for bringing new nuclear online is 15 years, new coal is between 7 and 10 years. A new solar plant of comparable output can be done in 2.
There is very little nuclear and coal construction happening in the developing world today and what little there is, is almost entirely driven by corruption. Literally big plant building companies bribing government ministers to build expensive plants rather than cheap ones. One of the worst culprits being the company that owned Chernobyl.
Either way - the risks that climate change presents to Africans (crop losses, starvation, plagues, droughts, floods) are also factors here. The harm from climate change will overwhelmingly hit poor countries far harder than rich ones -despite poor countries overwhelmingly being the least responsible for it.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
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.,
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You linked to the wrong page, that page is just a series of pictures of a lake from space for part of December 2013 through April 2014. That obviously has nothing to do with global average temperatures in either 2008 or 2015. That site has a post from this month that you can use to compare the averages in 2008 with 2015.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
But then again, Einstein proved a hundred years ago that there was no such thing as time
The Dunning-Kruger is strong in this one.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
No, we can't. Not even once.
If it's a large scale issue, there's always large $ at stake, and therefore always politics involved, along with all the associated trolls, shills, astroturfers and assorted wankers.
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
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.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
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
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.
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"?