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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...
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 *
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
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