Mainstream Scientists Cashing In On Climate Wagers (reuters.com) 252
Layzej writes: Climate contrarians have long predicted imminent global cooling. A few have been willing to place wagers that mainstream scientists have been quick to accept. Often acceptance of the bet is followed by immediate retraction, as was the case when "Bastardi's Wager" was accepted by Joseph Romm or when Maurice Newman's $10,000 bet was accepted by physicist Brian Schmidt. In some cases, bets have been formalized and the terms of many of those wagers are coming to a close. It may not be surprising to learn that those who put their money on the side of mainstream science are the ones who are cashing in.
Reuters reports that British climate expert Chris Hope just won a 2,000 pound sterling ($2,830) wager made five years ago against two members of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, who had bet Hope that the Earth would be cooling by now. They also highlight a $10,000 bet made in 2005 between British climate modeler James Annan and two Russian solar physicists. The solar physicists had counted on waning solar output to halt warming. Annan will win if average global temperatures from 2013-17 are warmer than 2003-07. "Things are looking good for my bet," Annan said.
Keith Pickering reports on a series of three bets between Brian Schmidt and climate contrarian David Evans, who also believed that diminishing solar output would dominate the temperatures of the last decade and beyond. The wagers pay out in 2019, 2024, and 2029. Pickering concludes, "What Evans apparently doesn't realize is that because of the thermal inertia of the oceans, within narrow bounds we can already predict what global temperatures will be in 2019, 2024, and 2029. And David Evans is going to lose his shirt."
Reuters reports that British climate expert Chris Hope just won a 2,000 pound sterling ($2,830) wager made five years ago against two members of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, who had bet Hope that the Earth would be cooling by now. They also highlight a $10,000 bet made in 2005 between British climate modeler James Annan and two Russian solar physicists. The solar physicists had counted on waning solar output to halt warming. Annan will win if average global temperatures from 2013-17 are warmer than 2003-07. "Things are looking good for my bet," Annan said.
Keith Pickering reports on a series of three bets between Brian Schmidt and climate contrarian David Evans, who also believed that diminishing solar output would dominate the temperatures of the last decade and beyond. The wagers pay out in 2019, 2024, and 2029. Pickering concludes, "What Evans apparently doesn't realize is that because of the thermal inertia of the oceans, within narrow bounds we can already predict what global temperatures will be in 2019, 2024, and 2029. And David Evans is going to lose his shirt."
Never give a sucker (Score:4, Insightful)
an even bet
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Indeed... I wonder whose wager included "within +/- 0.75 degree C of this year's average" ?
I mean, judging by what's happened so far, if any wager stands to win...
Silliness (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Silliness (Score:5, Insightful)
No, some people on the sinking boat are still betting on wether or not the boat is sinking.
Re: Silliness (Score:3, Insightful)
A far more apt analogy would be that some people are betting that the ship will rise into the air, science be damned!
Re: Silliness (Score:3, Insightful)
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True, but there's a certain amount of schadenfreude involved in forcing these idiots to put their money where their mouths are.
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Why not? If you lose, you're dead and have other things to worry about. If you win, you're richer.
Well for a Titanic bet anyway.
For GW, since the warming is unlikely to be stopped any time soon, they might as well make some money on it to buy some A/C in the meantime. I would not suggest buying any land on low lying islands, however.
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Exactly, eventually the Sun should fade and the Earth should cool down, if it is still there that is.
Maybe they didn't wait long enough... ;-)
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Exactly, eventually the Sun should fade and the Earth should cool down, if it is still there that is.
What earth? By the time the sun gets around to cooling down again, it will have swallowed up and vapourised the earth. Before then however, it's going to brignten more or less continuously.
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You're on!
Who's going to put the tiny fraction of a penny in an interest bearing escrow account?
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You do realize what inflation is going to do over the next four billion years, and how it's going to affect megabucks, don't you?
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Remember, the 1% were bailed out then also.
Re:Silliness (Score:4, Informative)
They weren't. The survival chance of a man first class was lower than a woman third class. Most of the crew behaved properly on that occasion [women and children first]. And I have the feeling that back then the rich and powerful men [while still being guilty of greed and malice] had bigger balls than those of today...
I do this for football. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, totally made a killing when I bet that the Chiefs would take out the Patriots last week.
All I had to do was apply a few post-game corrections to the score and the money just flowed right in.
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Double your losses by picking the Broncos this week
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A more accurate post would be 'Totally made a killing betting the Chiefs would lose by at least 5 points because I spend a lifetime studying football and every relevant parameter I could model. Over the years I've refined my model down to the point that I'm very confident I'll win any bet against somebody who simply bets emotionally because they want their team to win.
A fool and his money... (Score:4, Insightful)
That was pretty stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about the others, but I can see at least with Bastardi's Wager, they went with satellite data. That proved to be wise in retrospect. As regardless of which you use, lower troposphere satellite data has shown much less warning than the land/sea models used by the NOAA and the like. For them, 2015 was the third warmest year, and 2010 and champion 1998.
To actually make wagers expecting cooling seems extreme. Why not simply bet that warming would come in far short of the predictions mainstream scientists were putting out at the time? Maybe they couldn't get anyone to bite on those terms, maybe they were just that cocky, or most likely, they just wanted the media from putting money up predicting cooling.
Whatever the reason, if they'd wagered on more sane "you're models show too much warming" terms, they could have made some good money.
Re:That was pretty stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I see from one the articles, that one mainstream scientist did lose 100 pounds in a bet on the pace of global warming. So at least someone had a little more sense with their terms.
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So what's the bet? That 2016 will be warmer than 2015, is that your assertion? I'd like to make it clear it's not mine. I'm betting 2016 will not be warmer than 2015.
Great. We will use the UAH version 5.6 since you do not trust the surface station record. (6.x is currently in beta and changing too often to make any predictions with). The data can be found here: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/pu... [uah.edu] - see the "Globe" column. In the event that UAH5.6 is no longer available we will need to defer to the RSS satellite reconstruction. The data for rss can be found here: http://woodfortrees.org/data/r... [woodfortrees.org]
You either have no clue what you're doing (one might say you drank too much of the cool aid) or I have a feeling you think you know something I don't.
I think I have an advantage in that you appear to get your science repor
Re:That was pretty stupid. (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever the reason, if they'd wagered on more sane "you're models show too much warming" terms, they could have made some good money.
Except nobody would take that bet, because mathematically, it is always 50/50. A model will always predict higher or lower than the actual outcome. It will be one or the other, and actually it doesn't matter which, as long as the model correctly predicts within a useful percentile. Also the bet is meaningless: you could make a wager on something meaningful ("the average temperature between 2010 and 2020 will be within the error bands of model x") - in which case, for any GCM model (or later) the contrarians are on track to lose (again).
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Easy solution, just bet at a 10:1 ratio against their 95% confidence interval. If someone really believes in their confidence interval, then they should expect to on average double their money from that bet despite the unfavorable ratio. Unless it's this kind of study [xkcd.com]
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I'll wager that the list of AOGCM models described here [mpdl.mpg.de] will accurately predict the temperature incline within their error bars, out to 2030.
Measure date: 23 January 2030
Terms: 10:1 (i.e. you'll give me 10:1 odds), $50 (US) down.
Caveats: Some agreed variation on the predicted concentration of CO2 over the testing period will render the wager null, since this a human variation, not a model one.
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A model will always predict higher or lower than the actual outcome. It will be one or the other, and actually it doesn't matter which, as long as the model correctly predicts within a useful percentile.
Your logic breaks down as soon as there are two models to choose from. If one does have this 50/50 property then the other, which is predicting a different future temperature window, cannot also have this 50/50 property.
Re:That was pretty stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
The problem I think is that the climate change skeptics don't think that way. They have supreme confidence that it's all a hoax, that the data is falsified, that it's a plot to undermine the economy, etc. So they make the bet with bravado, expecting the mainstream scientists to back down or look foolish. Anyone starting with an attitude of "oh ya, put your money where your mouth is" won't be the sort of person who's going to be inspecting the data very closely, analyzing the odds, choosing the best measurement methods, etc.
Re: That was pretty stupid. (Score:4, Interesting)
> And you don't think mainstream scientist have absolute FAITH and conviction in their science?
No, they don't have absolute faith. That's why they have things called error bars that show the margins of error for any given results. That's why they often conclude with phrases like "further study is required". That's why there is an emphasis on reproducibility of results so that others can perform the same experiments to ensure that the study was done correctly.
The people who are the most skeptical about climate change tend to be the ones who haven't even looked at the evidence before claiming that it is all a hoax. No wonder the least skeptical are the scientists because they have actually looked at the overwhelming number of studies from all different scientific disciplines.
Remember, just because you simply "go with you gut feelings" on this subject doesn't mean that those whose job it is to study climate change unthinkingly believe that mankind is contributing to global warming. That is the mistake that the uneducated make; they assume that everyone else thinks along ideological lines like they do.
Re:That was pretty stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not simply bet that warming would come in far short of the predictions mainstream scientists were putting out at the time? Maybe they couldn't get anyone to bite on those terms, maybe they were just that cocky, or most likely, they just wanted the media from putting money up predicting cooling.
Whatever the reason, if they'd wagered on more sane "you're models show too much warming" terms, they could have made some good money.
Probably rhetoric. The contrarians are building their reputation on the idea that the scientists are incompetent, corrupt, or in some other way completely wrong. If the contrarians are right then the current warm temps are just the high point of a cycle, so in a few years it should be cooler.
By betting that temperatures will rise, just not quite as much as the scientists claim, they'd be essentially conceding that they think AGW is happening.
Besides, they already benefited by cashing in on the PR of actually making bet, the fact the eventually lost isn't really something they'll be motivated to share with their followers.
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I don't know about the others, but I can see at least with Bastardi's Wager, they went with satellite data. That proved to be wise in retrospect. As regardless of which you use, lower troposphere satellite data has shown much less warning than the land/sea models used by the NOAA and the like. For them, 2015 was the third warmest year, and 2010 and champion 1998.
Except the land and ocean temperatures used by NOAA aren't modeled. Satellite data is modeled.
Satellites don't measure temperature. The measure microwaves. Temperatures for broad swaths of the atmosphere are derived by running the microwave radiances through a model to derive temperature. That's one reason why using satellite data as your primary temperature data source a bad choice. Not only does it not measure surface temperature, it also isn't very accurate and must be constantly adjusted.
Also, since the
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Except the land and ocean temperatures used by NOAA aren't modeled.
That is not true. In order to average geographically dispersed readings without giving undue weight to collocated sensors you need to apply a model. The model for land ocean temperatures is fairly simple - essentially a gridded average + correction for known biases.
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Shirt (Score:4, Funny)
Well, at least losing the shirt will make it easier to withstand the higher temperatures.
Pyrrhic victory (Score:2)
The subject may say it all . . . While the right to say "I told you so" is nice, it sucks to be in the situation to say it.
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Well, if the article is to be believed, we're already in the situation. The CO2 has already been released and merely takes 14 to 17 years to manifest as temperature increase.
Then again, that's probably not a very compelling argument to any climate change denier!
What Brian fails to realize (Score:5, Funny)
If David loses he won't need his shirt. So the downside is limited.
Lose his shirt (Score:3)
Well it's not like he's going to need a shirt the way the temperatures keep going.
Good. We need more bets... (Score:3)
...because betting is a tax on bullshit. If anything needs to be taxed in this country, it's bullshit.
That said, it doesn't look like anyone has changed their minds over these bets. Even the losers are ignoring the holes in their pockets. I guess we need more bets...
It's also interesting to know who is making the bets. I've always wondered who genuinely disbelieves global warming and who claims to be a skeptic for political (or other) reasons. I'm guessing those that make large bets are sincere.
The ultimate bet is disaster insurance (Score:2)
Feedback loops (Score:2)
Earth has a ton of feedback systems. This is a bit like betting your internal temp will increase (to a meaningful degree) when you walk into a hot room. I would accept just about any bet where I win if the even doesn't happen or the feedback systems compensate, and I only lose if the event happens and the feedback systems don't compensate enough. Summary is wrong to credit being on the side of mainstream science. This is just probability.
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Clinton is still by far the favorite. The only shocking thing is that it isn't as certain as it was before.
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Election or primary?
There's a reason I'm asking for the distinction...
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As for me, I'm still holding hope for O'Malley. Go Martin! Move those tortoise legs!!
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Re:Let's bet on something more useful (Score:5, Funny)
It is forecasted that the Americans have a 100% chance of losing.
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I know that I should not feed the trolls, but why do you put up two mildly offensively obtuse straw men in your last two paras? The alternative names were to try to get past the petty carping of the "skeptics" though all remain valid just like there are multiple different words meaning 'pig-headed' or 'stupid' for example, and NO ONE in mainstream science is predicting *weather* or exact temperatures in "the following decades" and you well know it.
Damon
Re:"Climate contrarians" (Score:4, Funny)
I guarantee you though after the snowstorm this weekend there will be a lot of pig headed people claiming that this is proof that global warming is a hoax. That's why people don't say "global warming" anymore because it causes Bubba to say "dem smarty pants scientists sure is stupid, eh?"
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And an interesting point is that the global warming makes *more* snow likely as is dumping on he US right now, so the "Cold right now outside my house so can't be global warming, heh heh!" stupid is even more stupid...
Rgds
Damon
Re:"Climate contrarians" (Score:5, Insightful)
Morons who don't understand basic math, record keeping, science, logic.
We tried climate skeptics, but you complained. So we moved to deniers and you complained again, like a little whiny Trump.
As for your references to what we call climate change, again, one of those terms is 50 year old reference, the rest are names YOU made up and insisted we use.
We can only bend over backwards to help you out so many times.
You asked about what the temperature is supposed to be. The answer to that is simple.
We are talking about a SMALL change - 2 degrees Celsius in the next century. That can have a huge impact. Because it is so small, most people don't notice it. It's not enough to be visible and you should not notice it. Note, the world has already experienced a 1 degree Celsius change over the past 100 years.
But 1 degree Celsius is real, easily measurable, and our best projections show it will be at LEAST 2 degrees in 100 more years, possibly as much as 5 degrees. Now, even 5 degrees won't be enough to stop snow from falling most places. But it will be enough to melt large portions of the ice on Greenland and Antarctica, rising sea level enough to flood most major costal cities, where most of the wealth in the world currently resides.
Re:"Climate contrarians" (Score:5, Insightful)
To warm the atmosphere of an entire planet by even a fraction of a degree man's massive amounts of energy are being trapped. At the moment the oceans are acting as a massive heat sink, at some considerable effect to ocean ecosystems, but that capacity is going to decrease and sooner or later the lower atmosphere and surface temperatures will begin showing of qreater temperatures. We will have permafrost melting and releasing methanez exacerbating the situation.
The simple fact, known for over a century, is that CO2 traps solar radiation. It isn't the least bit controversial.
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I guess trying to associate those who don't accept the concept (or claimed extent) of man made global warming with the holocaust with the term 'deniers' wasn't working.
Care to make a wager on that?
Re:"Climate contrarians" (Score:4, Interesting)
Your local temperature will be almost irrelevant. It could be warmer, it could even be colder. Even now, the atmosphere doesn't cool or warm the surface in a uniform fashion everywhere.
Adding 2 degrees to the entire system is adding energy to the whole world's climate. That could express itself by more energetic behavior which could generate locally colder temperatures in certain places and certainly much warmer temperatures in others.
In reality, you'll see low lying islands go underwater and also some coastal flooding due to rising sea levels because ice packs are big enough to have a global effect if they start melting even slightly faster. Bad news, but not the end of the world. Global warming doesn't mean we end up like Venus, it means we have a humanitarian crisis on our hands due to displaced persons and loss of coastal cities.
For that reason, I think we need to be less concerned about taking extreme measures for "stopping" AGW as much as we should be starting evacuation preparations for the point in the future where we need to get people out of there. In the meantime we'll be able to replace our carbon releasing power sources on a more attainable timeframe.
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I agree with the 'relocation' idea, but frankly, look at New Orleans... heck, look at Denmark! It's going to be levies all the way... nobody is leaving the coastal regions until they are absolutely forced to. When Manhattan looks like Venice, they'll just build boats instead of taxies.
Re:"Climate contrarians" (Score:4, Interesting)
Humanitarian crisis? Initially sure. But in the end....
This will end up in war, a really really nasty one as those nations with surplus population being displaced look to take land and resources from others. There have been very few situations in human history where a large population was displaced that didn't end up in war.
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I completely agree. Global warming (and thus sea level rise) is going to happen, this is what the scientists are predicting, and I don't think there is a single proposal that gets it to halt entirely. We can and probably should slow it down by changing some behavior, but it simply won't be enough.
Some of the upper estimates for sea level rise are 6 feet. So we either bu
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Levees are fine but they won't work in much of Florida.
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And what is your solution to changing rainbelts which are going to wipe out agriculture in areas like the US Midwest? Sea level rise is probably the least of the things we have to worry about.
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I guess trying to associate those who don't accept the concept (or claimed extent) of man made global warming with the holocaust with the term 'deniers' wasn't working... a new term has been coined.
This is a legit improvement. It's not a loaded term unlike "climate denier" or "climate alarmist".
Granted, this is from the same group who has had a hard time naming the issue, going from global cooling, to global warming, anthropomorphic global warming, to climate change, to climate weirding and seemingly back to climate change.
There's a place for most of those terms (drop "climate weirding" into a casket and bury it). When they're used appropriately to their meaning, they're useful. But it continues to annoy me when someone uses "climate change" strictly for anthropogenic global warming (especially, when they're also completely ignoring others sorts of anthropogenic climate change like the trio of habitat destruction: urbanization, d
Re:"Climate contrarians" (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh look: moron alert!
going from global cooling
You've latched on to an old thing that was reported in the popular press decades ago and never widely accepted by mainstream science. This identifies you as an idiot who clearly has a strong opinion but has not lifted a finger to find out the actual truth behind it.
to global warming
Global warming means the earth is getting hotter.
anthropomorphic global warming,
This means people are causing the earth to get hotter.
to climate change,
The earth warming will cause the climate to change.
How is that so hard to understand?
climate weirding
I'm pretty sure you just made that up or got it off someone's tumblr pages.
I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what the temperature is supposed to be.
No you're not.
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I've seen "global weirding" used to express the fact that we're not just going to get an even 2K all over the planet, but that the extra energy is going to cause a lot of different effects.
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climate weirding
Coined by someone who was tired of idiots jumping up every time someone had a cool day (even in the middle of winter) and claiming there can't be global warming because someone somewhere still needs a coat.
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Thus endeth the pedantry.
I have been sonudly out pedanted. I yield the floor to you.
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Christ! It's not a difficult concept. We are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere beyond normal background natural processes.
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Christ! It's not a difficult concept. We are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere beyond normal background natural processes.
Which is why the new word for climate change deniers is "morons." Most of them are into other stupid crap, such as all sorts of conspiracy theories."Morons" covers the essential cause of why they do what they do.
Re:"Climate contrarians" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"Climate contrarians" (Score:5, Funny)
I guess trying to associate those who don't accept the concept (or claimed extent) of man made global warming with the holocaust with the term 'deniers' wasn't working... a new term has been coined.
Yes, "losers."
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I guess trying to associate those who don't accept the concept (or claimed extent) of man made global warming with the holocaust with the term 'deniers' wasn't working... a new term has been coined.
I've been occasionally using the term "climate contrarian" off and on for 5 years or so. But the term "climate science denier" is still perfectly apt for them.
Granted, this is from the same group who has had a hard time naming the issue, going from global cooling, to global warming, anthropomorphic global warming, to climate change, to climate weirding and seemingly back to climate change.
The history of the term "climate change" in relation to warming induced by added CO2 goes back at least to the 1950s. "Global cooling" was never a mainstream idea even when it had some publicity in the 1970s.
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You are right, there are people who are really skeptics. When I've used the term "climate contrarians" it's usually in reference to people like Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer who have the scientific training but as you say take a contrary position on the science.
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Granted, this is from the same group who has had a hard time naming the issue, going from global cooling, to global warming, anthropomorphic global warming
Anthropomorphic?
If you don't even know what it's called, why should we believe you when you say that the science is wrong?
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Ummm... what?? We are in an inter-glacial period. That is true. Which means temperatures are currently higher than they were during the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. On geological time scales, temperatures have been both higher and lower than they are now. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. If you scroll down to the "overall view" section, they give a nice graph showing how things have varied on many different time scales. In the last half billion years, they've been as much as 6 degrees
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The visual image of Limbaugh bawling like a baby fills me with elation and deep disgust.
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Mr. Beck has bawled many times on his show for very unusual "reasons". The bunch of them would be comical if not for the number of followers who take them seriously. The Bozo Cult.
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So this AC posts something that attempts to be rational (whether you agree with it or not, it's a valid attempt) and gets modded -1?
Evidence that it's unacceptable to be against the agenda and therefore must be silenced?
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Re:Sounds good, but devil is in details (Score:5, Insightful)
Here are the adjustments on satellite data: http://www.skepticalscience.co... [skepticalscience.com]
Re:Sounds good, but devil is in details (Score:4, Informative)
The Satellite records are better quality, as they cover the entire Earth evenly with a single instrument, all measurements taken at the same time of day using the same method, and so on.
Over time the measurements have been made from multiple satellites, not a single instrument. From the Wikipedia entry on satellite temperature measurements: [wikipedia.org]
Satellites do not measure temperature. They measure radiances in various wavelength bands, which must then be mathematically inverted to obtain indirect inferences of temperature. The resulting temperature profiles depend on details of the methods that are used to obtain temperatures from radiances. As a result, different groups that have analyzed the satellite data have produced differing temperature datasets. Among these are the UAH dataset prepared at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the RSS dataset prepared by Remote Sensing Systems.
The satellite time series is not homogeneous. It is constructed from a series of satellites with similar but not identical sensors. The sensors also deteriorate over time, and corrections are necessary for orbital drift and decay. Particularly large differences between reconstructed temperature series occur at the few times when there is little temporal overlap between successive satellites, making intercalibration difficult.
Re:Predicting the future.... (Score:5, Insightful)
global warming *cough* "Climate Change"
The warming of the earth causes the climate to change. Why do the nutjobs think they've stumbled on a deep conspiracy when they discover two different terms for different aspects of the same thing?
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global warming *cough* "Climate Change"
The warming of the earth causes the climate to change. Why do the nutjobs think they've stumbled on a deep conspiracy when they discover two different terms for different aspects of the same thing?
the fun part is hearing them rant about "gullible warmists" while they solemnly intone "when it stopped warming they changed the name to climate change from global warming" as they rant about the evil IPCC, and then asking them if they know what the CC in IPCC has stood for for the past 30 years.
denialists will believe anything fed to them by an Approved Authority, no questions asked.
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Do you really not know, or are you pretending not to understand? I'm not sure which is worse, ignorance or deliberate lies.
No, I do know and I do understand, I just hink people with opinions like you are utter raging morons.
It used to be called "global warming".
Yes it did, that's because that's what's happening.
But, this term got discredited due to scientists abusing science in order to push a left-wing agenda.
No it didn't. There was no discrediting. The globe is still warming.
So, they rebranded as "climat
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You can create a predictive model by retro-fitting current observations to past data, looking at trends and making certain assumptions, but it's still only a model. Such a model can be used, but it should never be "believed".
There's a pen sitting on my desk. I'm going to make a prediction: if I pick it up, then release it, it will fall back down again. But remember, I don't know. Predicting the future is not science. I just have a model based on past data and making certain assumptions. Such models can be used, but they should never be believed.
Ok, let's try it and see. Here goes...
Oh look! It fell! What a surprise! Isn't it amazing I got that right, even though my prediction was not based on science and there was no r
Re:Predicting the future.... (Score:5, Funny)
You sounds like one of those "gravity alarmists" to me. Perhaps you should follow the trail of funding for those scientists who research gravity. They are paid to find out more about it NOT prove it doesn't exist.
Follow the money...
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You can create a predictive model by retro-fitting current observations to past data, looking at trends and making certain assumptions, but it's still only a model.
It's a good thing that the big climate models don't work that way. Instead they use the physics to create a physical model. The only use observations and temperature data have to that kind of model is as something to compare the output to.
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"Pickering concludes, 'What Evans apparently doesn't realize is that because of the thermal inertia of the oceans, within narrow bounds we can already predict what global temperatures will be in 2019, 2024, and 2029...' "
A major part of science is the ability to verify a theory by independently repeatable experiments and observations. Predicting the future is not "science". You can create a predictive model by retro-fitting current observations to past data, looking at trends and making certain assumptions, but it's still only a model. Such a model can be used, but it should never be "believed". That's the problem with the global warming *cough* "Climate Change" alarmists. They honestly think they KNOW what global temperatures are going to be over the next several decades based on their climate models. The same types of models from decades ago made all sorts of dire predictions that never came to fruition and the same is true of today's models.
look up "curve fitting" and "scientific model" and see if you can understand the difference.
then see if you can wrap your head around the fact that every scientific theory, hypothesis, etc. is a model. F=MA is a model of the kinetics of objects, based on past observations. If you don't feel it predicts future behavior of objects, that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's just curve fitting with no attempt to understand the underlying mechanism.
Re:Completely fabricated nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
No, they've actually done that 0 times. What they've often done, and continue to do, is try to find ways to remove sources of error from the data. That's called "calibration", and is an essential part of any measurement technology.
Ars Technica just published a very thorough article about this, describing all the different types of corrections and why they're needed. See http://arstechnica.com/science... [arstechnica.com]. If you truly want to understand the subject, I highly recommend it. On the other hand, if you're just being a troll and don't care about the facts (I don't know whether you are or not--that's for you to decide), you obviously should ignore it.
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Apply that test and does it pass?
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Your patten also catches scientists who were being cautious and conservative to start with, so where there is uncertainty they adopt the option that gives the least radical results, the smallest anomaly, etc.
Then as the data and the methodologies improve and the uncertainties are resolved the results naturally become MORE surprising.
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No, the question is lalalalalalala I can't hear you / everything is fine / we don't need to spend money on anything.
Re:Dumbass Bets (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm getting tired of the "Of course it's getting warmer, we're still coming out of an ice age." argument. It just shows how little you've really looked in to the situation. If you did you would know that temperatures during the current interglacial were highest 6,000-8,000 years ago during the Holocene climatic optimum [wikipedia.org] and have been slowly cooling ever since as you would expect from the slow changes in Milankovitch cycles. It's only recently that temperatures took a sharp upward trajectory.
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And your qualifications to assess the data are?
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One thing that's very different about the current situation is that the CO2 level is over 400 ppm. In the past million years it's never risen above 300 ppm naturally.
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Re:Contrived Correlation (Score:4, Informative)