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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.
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...
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.
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.
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 *
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.
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
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!
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 *
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"?