Decades ago (it seems) when perhaps it was still possible to have good faith disagreements about the attribution of current climate trends, James Annan wrote a post here summarizing the thinking and practice of Climate Betting. That led to spate of wagers on continued global warming (a summary of his bets through 2005 and attempts to set up others is here).
There were earlier bets, the most well known perhaps was the one for $100 between Hugh Ellsaesser and Jim Hansen in 1989 on whether there would be a new temperature record within three years. There was (1990), and Ellsaesser paid up in January 1991 (Kerr, 1991). But these more recent bets were more extensive.
William Connolley (an early contributor to this site) was also a prolific bettor, and often took on the wilder predictions of sea ice collapse successfully. His tally of wins (mostly through anticipation of linear trends in summer sea ice) was in contrast to some rather fanciful extrapolations. One winning bet (against Joe Romm no less, and joint with James and Brian Schmidt) was related to when we would see essentially “ice free” conditions in the Arctic, with William taking the side of ‘not yet’ (note this has yet to be paid out).
But not all bets were made in good faith. James’ 2005 $10,000 bet with Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev on whether 2012-2017 would be warmer than 1998-2003 resulted in a clear win for James, but the Russian scientists have not paid up, or even responded to email in the subsequent two years.
With the close of 2020, a number of other climate bets have been resolved – all in favor of the people who bet on more warming. Dana Nuccitelli and Rob Honeycutt had a bet with blogger Pierre Gosselin and his readers that 2011 – 2020 would be warmer than the decade of 2001 – 2010 (and indeed it was). This was a charity bet with multiple people, some of whom (including Gosselin) have paid up, though many have not. Somewhat surprisingly, Gosselin has bet again on the next decade being cooler than the last. There’s a saying somewhere about fools and their money…
Even bets for much lower “steaks” have had trouble getting resolved. Zeke Hausfather has a running bet with Joe Bastardi (ex-Accuweather) on year-to-year warming in the UAH satellite record. By Zeke’s reckoning, Joe owes him the equivalent of five (or maybe four) steak dinners:
Ten years ago I made a bet with @BigJoeBastardi; he thought that the world would cool, while I projected it would warm. We settled on a paid dinner for me each year 0.1C above the prior decade avg (2001-2010) and for him each year 0.1C below, using UAH.
— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) February 1, 2021
He now owes me 5 dinners pic.twitter.com/8HICoAtLRD
There have of course been many bets offered that were not taken up.
For instance, it was quite revealing that Richard Lindzen was agreeable to betting on global cooling, but only with such extreme odds that actually placed him well inside the mainstream.
In another example, Bastardi was offered a much bigger bet by Bill Nye ($10,000) on whether 2016 would be a top ten year, and whether this last decade would be the warmest on record [Narrator: they were]. But perhaps that was a little rich for his taste.
The contributors at RealClimate offered a bet to Noel Keenlyside and colleagues against their prediction of global cooling. This was not taken up either (and yes, they would have won easily).
Another (rather oddly structured) bet was proposed in 2007 by forecasting ‘guru’ Scott Armstrong to Al Gore (who rightly ignored it). Armstrong used to keep up a commentary on how his imaginary bet was going (though it hasn’t been updated since July 2020). This bet was odd not only because Armstrong made up a forecast trend from IPCC of 0.3ºC/dec (the forecasts in AR4 (2007) were much closer to 0.2ºC)/dec, but because the scoring was cumulative on whether each individual monthly anomaly in the UAH TLT record was closer to no-change or to the “IPCC” trend. This is a noisy metric on short time scales resembling a random walk. Nonetheless, to the surprise (I’m sure) of Prof. Armstrong, the trend in UAH TLT is more than 0.3ºC/dec from 2007-2020, though his preferred metric has yet to flip (it’s close to doing so, and the equivalent skill metric for annual values already has).
So what have we learned?
Originally, the idea of betting was to get a sense of how confident predictive claims were. The more confident one was, the smaller odds one would accept. The hope would be to distinguish rhetorical claims from claims that were sincerely held. However, if people are prepared to make casual (no escrow) bets that they have no intention of paying up on if they lose, the ability to distinguish good and bad faith claims vanishes. It turns out some people’s desire to not be publicly shamed by being a known deadbeat is not as strong as one might have anticipated.
But the bigger lesson is actually how predictable aspects of the climate are. Decade by decade increases in temperature are a very robust prediction from the current rise in GHGs. New records will continue to be set in annual global temperatures. While weather can easily shape a season, the longer term trends (so far at least) appear quasi-linear.
The winners in these bets for the most part relied on relatively straightforward projections of forcings and response, without dramatic non-linearities. Past performance is no guarantee of future gains, but at the global level, this seems like a successful formula for winning any new climate bets.
It’ll be probably be harder to find takers in future.
References
- R.A. KERR, "Global Temperature Hits Record Again", Science, vol. 251, pp. 274-274, 1991. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.251.4991.274
Thanks! I’ve also won the first phase of my 2007 bet with David Evans set at time periods of 10, 15, and 20 years.
https://rabett.blogspot.com/2020/01/ive-won-my-climate-bet-for-1500-what-do.html
Probably a number of other bets out there too.
I posted this yesterday, in response to the WC piece Gavin cites”
“As Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last month that:
“We are headed for a catastrophic temperature rise of 3-5 [degrees Celsius] this century ”
As 8 decades of the 21st century remain, who wants to bet that nobody at the UN steps forward to bet on temperatures rising 3/8 C between now and Jan . 2031, as needed to keep the Sec Gen’s playbook in play ?
04/02/2021, 01:50 Delete
Here is a Swedish bet Per Welander who ran the Swedish blog “moderna myter” and later moved over to “The Climate Scam”/”Stockholmsinitiativet”/”Klimatrealisterna” (The do like changing names) made with me:
http://blog.moderna-myter.se/2007/04/utmaning-sl-vad-om-globala-uppvrmningen.html
The bet was whether the trend as given by GISS would be lower or higher than 0,15 K/decade and it was split into four five year periods with increasing stakes since the first would be mostly noise. Per won the first, I won the second, and the last two are cancelled since Per passed away.
Check out the cover of Time magazine from April 8, 1977:
https://www.senewmexicowx.org/2017/07/agw-climate-change-crowd-mainstream.html
I remember reading about the coming ice age in the “Weekly Reader” in elementary school back in the 60s. :)
As I’m 66, I don’t know how long I would be able to sustain it, but I would be willing to wager that GAT doesn’t rise to .2C in any decade in my lifetime.
[Response: You don’t need to wait! GISTEMP trend from 2001 to 2020 is 0.23ºC/dec. Difference btw 2011-2020 and 2001-2010 is 0.21ºC, difference btw, 1991-2000 and the following decade is 0.24ºC etc. etc. In HadCRUT5 the last 20 year trend is exactly 0.2ºC/dec. I could go on, but you’d do well to the math before you wagered any actual money. – gavin]
Well, that’s what happens when contrarians/denialists take betting advice from Judith Curry, instead of listening to the IPCC.
Judith Curry, in 2012:
“I. IPCC AGW hypothesis: 20th century climate variability/change is explained by external forcing, with natural internal variability providing high frequency ‘noise’. In the latter half of the 20th century, this external forcing has been dominated by anthropogenic gases and aerosols. The implications for temperature change in the 21st century is 0.2C per decade until 2050.
[…]
Is the first decade+ of the 21st century the warmest in the past 100 years (as per Peter Gleick’s argument)? Yes, but the very small positive trend is not consistent with the expectation of 0.2C/decade provided by the IPCC AR4. In terms of anticipating temperature change in the coming decades, the AGW dominated prediction of 0.2C/decade does not seem like a good bet, particularly with the prospect of reduced solar radiation.
Has there been any warming since 1997 (Jonathan Leake’s question)? There has been slight warming during the past 15 years. Is it “cherry picking” to start a trend analysis at 1998? No, not if you are looking for a long period of time where there is little or no warming, in efforts to refute Hypothesis I.”
https://archive.is/3GNNa#selection-401.0-405.308
Fortunately, Curry told us what type of sources to use to assess that projected trend:
“This is why i prefer the reanalyses, such as ERA5. They assimilate the radiances measured by the satellites.”
https://archive.is/78lmm#selection-6637.0-6891.109
So what do those sources show? ~0.2°C/decade of global warming over the post-1997 and post-1998 time-periods who’s start-points Curry cherry-picked to coincide with warm El Niño years (in her attempt to use endpoint bias to obscure the long-term warming trend):
https://archive.is/XDrj8
[ https://www.psl.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/data/testdap/timeseries.pl
https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1348566747901788165
– also see:
https://climexp.knmi.nl/selectfield_rea.cgi?id=someone@somewhere
http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html ]
I don’t think those are the kind of forecasting errors folks would want from Curry’s company Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN), especially if folks risk their money on her forecasts’ accuracy. Similarly so for our broader society risking our economy, livelihoods, etc., when people defend debunked claims made by (faux) ‘skeptics’ like Curry. I’d rather rely on the IPCC instead of Curry, since Curry’s own reasoning shows the “IPCC AGW hypothesis” is panning out, while her betting advice isn’t.
As noted in the IPCC’s 2018 Special Report:
“Estimated anthropogenic global warming matches the level of observed warming to within ±20% (likely range). Estimated anthropogenic global warming is currently increasing at 0.2°C (likely between 0.1°C and 0.3°C) per decade due to past and ongoing emissions (high confidence).”
https://web.archive.org/web/20200217030401/https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15_Full_Report_High_Res.pdf
So let’s not kill the IPCC, regardless of the toxic and baseless things some people may say about it.
Judith Curry, in 2013:
“We need to put down the IPCC as soon as possible – not to protect the patient who seems to be thriving in its own little cocoon, but for the sake of the rest of us whom it is trying to infect with its disease.”
https://archive.is/xwVsw#selection-325.154-325.363
Judith Curry, in 2011:
“Well thank you IPCC authors [includes: Kevin Trenberth, Susan Solomon, Ben Santer, and Judith Lean, who were mentioned by Curry] for letting us know what is really behind that “very likely” assessment of attribution 20th century warming [sic]. A lot of overbloated over confidence that cannot survive a few years of cooling. The light bulbs seem to be just turning on in your heads over the last two years.”
http://archive.is/7DUGe#selection-483.0-485.304
Mr Know it all, one thing you should know is that that Time cover is a well known fake. It’s an edited cover from 2007 about global warming:
https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/1977-coming-ice-age-time-magazine-cover-is-a-fake/
“According to the NOAA 2019 Global Climate Summary, the combined land and ocean temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.07°C (0.13°F) per decade since 1880; however, the average rate of increase since 1981 (0.18°C / 0.32°F) is more than twice as great.”
[Response: You have independently discovered that warming has accelerated since the 19th C. Well done! – gavin]
@4
More KIA rank stupidity/dishonesty/propaganda/all three.
Here is a picture of the Apr 4, 1977 cover https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/15502788.jpg?quality=85&w=280
Here is a picture of the Apr 11, 1977 cover https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/15502789.jpg?quality=85&w=280
There was NO Time issue on Apr 8, 1977 (nor on Apr 9, 1977 which I have also seen, though you’d think KIA could at least have his lies contain a little truth–good agitprop requires that and he failed). Here is the time.com statement regarding the faked cover which somehow fooled our resident genius. https://time.com/5670942/time-magazine-ice-age-cover-hoax/
Mr. KnowF^%$All says:
I remember reading about the coming ice age in the “Weekly Reader” in elementary school back in the 60s.
It’s too bad you haven’t learned anything since then.
I remember the Time Cover story about “the coming ice age” that Mr. Know It All cites. Unlike him, I was a mature adult who read the article in Time, not the “Weekly Reader”. His comparison is a false equivalence. The topic got some play in the popular media — who doesn’t love a “man bites dog” story? — but faded rather quickly and never got support in the scientific community. Any comparison with the present alarm about global climate change is absurd.
KIA says:
“Check out the cover of Time magazine from April 8, 1977”
Yes, we’re aware as to where you get your knowledge regarding climate science from. Magazine covers.
@KIA #4 Very funny! Time cover dates are Mondays. April 8, 1977 was a Friday! That “cover” has been known as a fraud for a long time.
I have a link to the Newsweek article by the Author.
Link to My 1975 “Cooling story”.
http://www.insidescience.org/content/my-1975-cooling-world-story-doesnt-make-todays-climate-scientists-wrong/1640
Quote
“The central fact is that, after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the Earth seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.” – Newsweek: April 28, 1975
That’s an excerpt from a story I wrote about climate science that appeared almost 40 years ago. Titled “The Cooling World,” it was remarkably popular; in fact it might be the only decades-old magazine story about science ever carried onto the set of a late-night TV talk show. Now, as the author of that story, after decades of scientific advances, let me say this: while the hypotheses described in that original story seemed right at the time, climate scientists now know that they were seriously incomplete. Our climate is warming — not cooling, as the original story suggested.
Thomas Fuller:
Gavin, inline:
You may no longer be Truculent Tom, but assuming GAT means GMST, you’d still lose the bet. For any of the 4 satellite and 4 global surface datasets at Kevin Cowtan’s temperature trend calculator (although they’re a little outdated by now too), plug in the 30-year interval 1992-2021. The only curve with a slope less than 0.2ºC/decade is UAHv6.0 TLT.
I’ve got a couple $100 bets on temperature increase/decrease that I’ve recently won (though, yet to collect).
More recently, and on a different subject, I bet $1k in early December 2020 on who would end up being inuagurated on Jan 20. We had a neutral third party hold cashier’s checks, so that one paid off nicely.
RE. Mr. Know Nothing @4
Of course the magazine cover shown by Mr. Know Nothing is fake.
The actual cover of that issue with the penguin states: “The Global Warming Survival Guide” and certainly not how to survive the coming ice age as shown at his denier misinformation link.
https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/1977-coming-ice-age-time-magazine-cover-is-a-fake/
Mr. Know Nothing is nothing but a selfish lying climate denying morally corrupt fool who cares nothing of the future of our descendants. Likely he is paid to post his drivel.
Climate deniers might read this excellent article.(First paragraph):
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/extreme-climate-change-history/617793/
We live on a wild planet, a wobbly, erupting, ocean-sloshed orb that careens around a giant thermonuclear explosion in the void. Big rocks whiz by overhead, and here on the Earth’s surface, whole continents crash together, rip apart, and occasionally turn inside out, killing nearly everything. Our planet is fickle. When the unseen tug of celestial bodies points Earth toward a new North Star, for instance, the shift in sunlight can dry up the Sahara, or fill it with hippopotamuses. Of more immediate interest today, a variation in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere of as little as 0.1 percent has meant the difference between sweltering Arctic rainforests and a half mile of ice atop Boston. That negligible wisp of the air is carbon dioxide.
Straw people and red herrings
The argument has moved on from whether Earth is warming, to fighting lies about the solutions. Now it’s about clean safe renewable energy, do-nothing responses like Republican “innovation” and supposedly conservative- and market religion-friendly solutions like carbon pricing etc. There’s always been reluctance to bet against warming because most people know it’s warming; now there’s even less because there’s nothing to gain. Is there anyone with any weight who still believes it’s not warming?
It always seemed clear to me that raising the steaks above a meal (although, who would want to spend a minute in the company of a creep like Bastardi? So… ) would have been good. Maybe not just betting against the house but actually betting the house that it would keep warming. That might have attracted enough attention to the losing denying delayalist that it might have silenced at least a few, a few years early.
But as I said, the argument has moved on. Iceland has a 100% renewable grid, 81% renewable primary energy and a 45% EV market share (part of primary energy); Norway has a 98% renewable grid, 40%+ renewable primary energy, and an 87% EV market share (Dec.). Other countries are close in some ways, farther in others, from being 100% powered by renewable energy. But some people are still, amazingly, insisting we can’t get to 100% clean safe renewable energy.
How bout a bet on who’s first and when? On whether carbon prices or mandates get us there faster? For the house!
The bet that I remember from the past is the one the swivel-eyed denialists actually won, the 2008 bet between James Annan (his third AGW bet) and one of the Gentlemen Who Prefer Fantasy, David Whitehouse. The bet for £100 concerned the old HadCRUT3 and was waged on whether one of the years 2008-11 would exceed 1998 as hottest-on-record, or not.
At the time HadCRUT3 was getting an increasing reputation for having a trend-defying status and had another temperature record been chosen, the result would have gone the other way. As it was, even up to mid-2014 when the HadCRUT3 data was discontinued, 1998 stood unchallenged by all subsequent years, the 1998 anomaly standing at +0.55ºC while 2010 only managed to equal 2003 & 2005 on +0.48ºC and the other years in the bet below that again; 2009 +0.44ºC, 2011 +0.34ºC & 2008 +0.33ºC.
Perhaps the biggest losers were the BBC’s ‘More Or Less’ team who acted as umpires but whose coverage of the result rather exposed them as having an unhealthy level of ‘balance’ in their coverage of AGW. While this was common, indeed policy, at the BBC back then, ‘More Or Less’ is supposed to be a fact-checking programme and so should have managed to better cope with such ‘false balance’.
#17 If KIA is paid for his “work” someone is wasting their money!
The latest from Judith Curry is excerpted here: https://www.masterresource.org/debate-issues/curry-interview-2021-science-i/
“And now we have way too much confidence in some very dubious climate models and inadequate data sets. And we’re not really framing the problem broadly enough to … make credible projections about the range of things that we could possibly see in the 21st century.”
[Response: If she thinks the projections are not credible she could bet on the real world exceeding the uncertainties from the spread. She won’t though. – gavin]
@Thomas Fuller says in #5:
“As I’m 66, I don’t know how long I would be able to sustain it, but I would be willing to wager that GAT doesn’t rise to .2C in any decade in my lifetime.”
I wish you live as long as you see fit. But you’ve already lost the wager anyway. Warming is 0.2°C/decade from 1991-2020, 2001-2020, and 2011-2020 in analyses such as:
– ERA5
– NASA’s GISTEMP
– Berkeley Earth
– NOAA
That’s easily checkable with sources such as:
https://psl.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/data/testdap/timeseries.pl (NOAA’s Web-based Reanalysis Intercomparison Tool [WRIT])
http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html
I haven’t included HadCRUT5 from “the UK group” (as Judith Curry calls them) since HadCRUT5 currently only goes up to 2018. But when it’s updated to 2020, it will likely join the list above as showing 0.2°C/decade of global warming up to 2020.
And even ideologically-motivated contrarians like Judith Curry + Ryan Maue approve of ERA5. So complaining about the analyses listed above won’t help. Curry even worked with the Berkeley Earth team on developing their analysis.
Judith Curry:
“This is why i prefer the reanalyses, such as ERA5. They assimilate the radiances measured by the satellites.”
https://archive.is/78lmm#selection-6637.0-6891.109
Ryan Maue:
“Judy, thanks for highlighting the use of reanalysis datasets for global temperatures.
ECMWF uses 4-D variational data assimilation to optimally combine all sources of data include satellites, surface stations, balloons, aircraft, ships, etc.
A new reanalysis is being conducted called the ERA5 under the auspices of the ERA-CLIM2 project. This model will be coupled (atm+ocean) and provide the best estimate yet of the historical climate system from essentially the point of view of the best weather modeling system currently available.
All of this controversy about NASA, NCDC etc. temperature “fixing” or adjustments will be a moot point very soon (2016-17).”
http://archive.is/yhhf4#selection-1933.0-1961.123
Judith Curry:
“The surface temperature data sets that I have confidence in are the UK group and also Berkeley Earth.”
http://archive.is/hw88D#selection-1203.134-1203.235
See also Tamino’s 2008 “You Bet” and the 2016 result:
2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20080409021707/https://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/01/31/you-bet/
2016: https://tamino.wordpress.com/2016/09/02/you-bet/
There is an interesting side angle to the occasional “global cooling” stories from the 70’s: under a natural (Milankovitch-cycle paced)regime the planet may well have continued to overall cool (with the usual short term ups and downs, of course) for the rest of the 20th century – the “big picture” of the natural shape and duration of past interglacials was what caught climatologists eyes back then. But this provides no comfort for warming denialists, since the background picture reinforces the calculation that more than 100% of the recent warming is attributable to net anthropogenic effects. Far from discrediting the picture of global warming, now that we have more information, that significant natural background is part of the cause for concern.
re: 17. You nailed it and him. Of course KIA is too much of a coward and way too insecure to be able to admit he posted fake information. Cowards like never admit to being wrong. On science or otherwise. See his vile “Pittsburgh synagogue shooting” comments.
KIA 4: I remember reading about the coming ice age in the “Weekly Reader” in elementary school back in the 60s. :)
BPL: I can’t believe idiot boy is bringing this one up AGAIN.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/03/the-global-cooling-mole/
Aw, come on guys! If you take their lies away, Mr. KIA and Tom Fuller will be left with absolutely nothing to believe in! How are they to compete with reality’s well known liberal bias?
You think so? Seems unlikely to me, because a) stony fields for it here, I’d have thought, and b) excessive QC fails, even for a field in which both Q & C are pretty questionable most of the time anyhow.
It would be funny if it weren’t sad that know-nothing “know it all” cites a fake and claimed he saw it in school as a kid. Is there a real story there, did his teacher really present that as fact? If so, where? [please don’t reply, no need to fill up space with fakery or blow it into a gassy mass of delusion.]
—
Today’s science follow-up from James Hansen to yesterday’s letter to Boris Johnson will probably test my limits, but yesterday’s original is worth a look. He recommends “acumen” and “gumption” but I suspect those words are too long for a former scholar bent on trading on his lumpish stupidity while helping his wealthy supporters steal everything that isn’t bolted down (see reduction in NHS, with half the hospital beds they had in the aughts, great preparation for a pandemic).
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2021/20210203_HANSEN-JOHNSON_Letter.pdf
UK is going ahead with a new coal mine, forsooth! Shame on them!!
I had a bet (I think I offered odds of 10:1, $10K) that by 2035 climate change would be so bad it would be impossible to deny it. However, it was never recorded in a location capable of follow-through and I’m afraid the delusional, demonstrated by recent events in US, will never give up, and the lack of quantification there means I’m lucky the lying liar has disappeared from the haunts of NYTimes comments. We were supposed to meet on top of Cadillac Mountain, but I would be 88 by then, so doubt I’ll be able to collect. Silly me.
I don’t pay much attention to Judith Curry, but the post above reminded me of her. While not an out-and-out denialist, she is peeved by some of the currents of opinion, is not convinced we know much about warming caused by CO2 etc versus natural variation, and is not convinced warming is super dangerous.
She’s a baby boomer about my age, and has spent her whole career watching the thermometers show us about 0.2C per decade rise. I wonder how many decades more of this would suffice to change her mind, or those similarly inclined. How many decades of pretty good predictions by mainstream models and the IPCC, and failed or absent predictions by the likes of Curry, not to mention all the folks who are outright insane.
About the dangers of climate change, I’d mention another look ahead from some years back, by Joe Romm. IIRC, during his time writing on the Climate Progress blog, he predicted that, absent significant mitigation efforts, the 2020’s and 2030’s would see more and more striking climate-influenced disasters. We’re just getting into that time period, but wildfires alone are already indicating Romm is in the ballpark, without even mentioning sea level rise, tropical storms, droughts, floods, and other effects on agriculture. I’m sure Curry’s approach is to wait another generation or two, until we can securely attribute portions of these symptoms to AGW (if enough of industrial civilization remains to do that kind of science) while truculently pointing out that these things are pretty complex, and not necessarily 100% due to the most obvious candidate causes.
12 :
The 1950’s Collier’s Magazine cover article asking ” Are Atom Bomb Tests Changing The Weather?” has been superceeded by the latest new theory on forest fires and radiative forcing :
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2021/02/as-camp-fire-raged-through-northern.html
Kevin McKinney @29 et al
Sure on the surface for those knowledgable about the science behind AGW Mr. Know Nothing’s posts often seem inane and unsophisticated making the idea of him being a paid troll unlikely.
However, I’m not so sure.
First, his persona is designed to be disarming and this has allowed him to post freely on this serious science site with very little moderation for many years. Most denier trolls that come here have a short shelf life as their nonsense is only tolerated for a relatively short period before being banished to the “borehole”.
Secondly, his relatively innocuous posts of misinformation remain uncontested for the period of the moderation delay. It would seem the desire is that any unsuspecting uninformed guest to the site just may be influenced by his post before it is slammed by the regulars (even then since he often posts early in the thread some casual readers may not even read much past his post). Once contested, he generally moves on without acknowledgment or debate rather just waiting for the next opportunity to slip in his tripe. He apparently is also satisfied that he usually has been somewhat successful in derailing and diluting the discussion of the original topic and anyway his post stood for a period uncontested.
Being argumentative would hurt his persona and, of course, accepting the rebuttals would make him less of the “skeptic” he claims to be.
He has no shame and it all seems contrived to me. Or not.
Know nothing appears on this website regularly about once a month for a few days, like someone possibly doing the rounds of different websites. He also repeats the exact same list of myths. He has extremely strong ideological views. His tone is polite. It all a pattern that suggests he’s a paid lobbyist, or just does unpaid work on behalf of a political party.
OK, I MAY have been tricked into thinking the Time cover I linked to was real – I admit it! There were, as others indicate above stories about coming global cooling back in the 70s in major news outlets.
25 – Simon C
“. But this provides no comfort for warming denialists, since the background picture reinforces the calculation that more than 100% of the recent warming is attributable to net anthropogenic effects.”
What is meant by “more than 100% of the recent warming”?
30 – Susan Anderson
“It would be funny if it weren’t sad that know-nothing “know it all” cites a fake and claimed he saw it in school as a kid.”
To clarify, I did not mean I saw the Time cover in the Weekly Reader – I meant that there were stories about a coming ice age. Sorry if I was not clear.
31 – Susan Anderson
“We were supposed to meet on top of Cadillac Mountain, but I would be 88 by then, so doubt I’ll be able to collect. Silly me.”
FYI, there is a road to the top of Cadillac Mountain. I hope you make it. ;)
Climate scientists acting as bookies does not do anything to help the tarnished image and turmoil surrounding the climate science debate. Though it is interesting and a little fun.
“Somewhat surprisingly, Gosselin has bet again on the next decade being cooler than the last. There’s a saying somewhere about fools and their money…”
A bet on the future serves their goals: delay, delay, delay.
J4Z@19 – Iceland is not an example because nowhere on earth could it be replicated due to its unique geography and economic position.
Norway is only able to achieve what they did because of the hundreds of billions (trillions?) from ongoing FF production.
EVs create more problems than they solve. We need to take 75% of the cars off the road not add more.
But don’t let the facts get in the way of your hopeium high.
Jef @39, wind and solar power is looking inevitable, because its now mostly cheaper to build and run than fossil fuels. Google the Lazard international energy analysis.
The problem with waving your hand and demanding 75% of cars be taken off roads is that our cities and civilisation are built around the car. Changing this is therefore a difficult and costly long term project. Making public transport work in cities designed around cars is really hard. I know because my home city has been trying for decades with very limited success despite spending a fortune on public transport. And I lobby in favour of better public transport, but I see the challenges as well. So we will need plenty of new cars for decades to come, and its better they be EV’s. EVs are better than ICE cars if you look carefully and consider all factors.
19 – J4Zonian
“Iceland has a 100% renewable grid, 81% renewable primary energy and a 45% EV market share (part of primary energy)…”
Iceland has a population of 342,608 as of today, about 1/4 the size of Raleigh-Cary, NC. :) https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/iceland-population/
99.8% of their electricity is provided by hydro and geothermal, with a very small 0.2% from FF (probably for remote areas). Hydro/geo are not available in most places. Pick a larger area that is 100% PV,wind,etc that is available in most places and when they are up to 100% RE 24/7/365, let us know. ;)
j 39: EVs create more problems than they solve. We need to take 75% of the cars off the road not add more.
BPL: Prove it. Show your work.
RE. Mr. Know Nothing @36
Aw shucks, Mr. Know Nothing finally admits to a lie. Sorta.
But why post the link to the cover in the first place? A well known dubious link that could have easily been fact checked prior to its use by anyone with a sliver of compunction or integrity. But no, that wouldn’t serve Mr. Know Nothing’s purpose of casting doubt by insinuating that climate science is flawed.
And of course the subject of the 1970s cooling story in the popular media has been discussed ad nauseam here at Real Climate and yet Mr. Know Nothing brings it up once again. Why? Why? Why? He knows better unless he is a complete idiot. Which actually, dimwittedness is part of his schtick–gee whiz, look at his cover from Time Magazine!
Give me a break.
The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Consensus
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26220900?seq=1
jef:
Huh? What problems do EVs create that are worse than global warming? And why only 75% of the cars off the road? Why not 85%, or 100%?
jef:
Heh. I’ve never heard hope analogized to an illicit drug before. Clever, if sad; everyone can use a little hope, and going cold turkey can be fatal. Yet hope is all that motivates us to act collectively against any looming disaster. You’ll find little appetite for defeatism regarding AGW here.
As for your counter-claims to J4Z: you might be wrong, but at least you’re sure ;^D! Even if your facts are correct, however, are you someone who needs not only to be right, but everyone else to be wrong? There’s enough of that already on display at RC, no?
‘Mr. Know It All’ says in #36:
“OK, I MAY have been tricked into thinking the Time cover I linked to was real – I admit it! There were, as others indicate above stories about coming global cooling back in the 70s in major news outlets.”
You’re cherry-picking to exclude 1970s media sources on imminent warming. Moreover, 1970s scientists were predominately predicting imminent global warming (when they actually made predictions), government officials were concerned about imminent warming, and media sources discussed human-caused global warming going back to at least the 1910s. These points have been covered over and over again in sources such as:
“An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales.”
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bams2370_1.xml
“In the 1970s, few scientists published peer-reviewed papers about any climate change faster than the thousands of years that glacial ages apparently took to evolve. Of those few papers, only a small fraction concluded that anthropogenic cooling was likely; others discussed cooling and warming factors without coming to a conclusion, and more than half thought it likely that greenhouse warming would eventually dominate”
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/wcc.6
“To compare the handful of cooling predictions in the 1970s (predominantly from media sources, not peer-reviewed literature) to the current scientific consensus endorsing human-caused global warming, is both inappropriate and misleading.”
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-007-5757-8_24
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/1912-article-global-warming/
https://www.smokeandfumes.org/documents/16
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdALFnlwV_o&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6YyvdYPrhY
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/nov/05/scientists-warned-the-president-about-global-warming-50-years-ago-today
https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibrary/documents/jul10/56.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/01/on-its-hundredth-birthday-in-1959-edward-teller-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming
https://www.nytimes.com/1956/10/28/archives/science-in-review-warmer-climate-on-the-earth-may-be-due-to-more.html
So please feel free to stop spreading disinformation on this topic. But given what other people on here have said about your pattern of behavior, you’re unlikely to stop.
45
Just so- Wally Broeker injected “global warming” into the conversation in a 1975 Science article:
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2019/08/what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it.html
If Iceland is too small, how about Uruguay, which is an order of magnitude larger? From a position early in this century in which they were importing massive amounts of oil and also lots of electricity, they’ve become pretty much energy self-sufficient, with about 97% renewable electricity generation today. That’s cut their CO2 emissions by 88%. Oh, and they’re reportedly saving upwards of $200 million US every year, too.
True, they started with a lot of hydropower, but a big point in using wind and solar was to reduce reliance on that hydropower as a means of resilience against drought–with which they had an unfortunate experience.
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/28651/why-uruguay-s-unprecedented-shift-to-clean-energy-is-a-model-for-the-world
https://energytransition.org/2020/01/uruguay-latin-americas-renewable-champion/
I did a few papers in physical geography at university back in 1980 and one of the texts was “atmosphere, weather and climate” barry and chorley, published the 1970’s. In the chapter on climate change they discuss the flat temperatures around that time, and there was no mention of predictions of cooling or a consensus there would be cooling. My understanding is the cooling issue was just the media cherry picking a couple scientists that thought there may be cooling coming, but most research at the time predicted warming as below. KIA is gullible and lazy and doesn’t check things carefully enough and only hears what he wants to hear.
https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm
Nig@40 – Cheaper than still does not make it cost effective.
Plz read; https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/02/03/where-energy-modeling-goes-wrong/
Not waving my hand and demanding any more than the .Gov waves its hand and demands everyone stop everything and lockdown but if you proclaim we can’t do what is needed then I guess we are Scroomed.
jef:
Heh. Look how well that worked out. In any case, “the government waves its hand and demands everyone stop everything and lockdown, so I can” is at best a tu quoque rhetorical tactic 8^D.