Do you really believe in climate change? Gambling and global warming

[wacki]

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Being a weak skeptic, I am willing to bet up to 1000$ that the average of the decade after 2015 will be cooler than the decade that precedes it if I was given 9:1 odds(which is around the confidence level that the latest IPCC summary feels that CO2 contributed to the majority of the warming).

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In otherwords you believe the IPCC report is accurate. [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

Your bet is like saying "i'm a skeptic that you will roll a 6 on a 6 sided die sp lets bet against the 6 while laying 5:1 odds". It's pointless on a political scale.

[wacki]

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What sorts of bets would be possible to test this theory over a reasonable time period (less than 30 years)?

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There are many people that are willing to make $10,000 bets after only 12 years. There of measuring the warming. One way is to simply look at the surface temperature record from NASA or the Met Office. People generally take a 6 year temperature average to smooth out any short term fluctuations/noise.

Another way is to simply look at the global ice mass of the glaciers.

Another way is to look at the temperature readings from the ARGO network in the ocean. There is much less short term noise from these readings.

There are dozens of ways to make bets on global warming. Many very knowledgeable people are willing to bet their life savings on a 12 year lifespan. I would prefer to play it rock solid safe and go for ~20 which is a span of 2 solar cycles. But with the speed that parts of the earth is changing I'm certainly starting to think 12 years is more than adequate for betting purposes.

[adios]

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What sorts of bets would be possible to test this theory over a reasonable time period (less than 30 years)?

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There are many people that are willing to make $10,000 bets after only 12 years. There of measuring the warming. One way is to simply look at the surface temperature record from NASA or the Met Office. People generally take a 6 year temperature average to smooth out any short term fluctuations/noise.

Another way is to simply look at the global ice mass of the glaciers.

Another way is to look at the temperature readings from the ARGO network in the ocean. There is much less short term noise from these readings.

There are dozens of ways to make bets on global warming. Many very knowledgeable people are willing to bet their life savings on a 12 year lifespan. I would prefer to play it rock solid safe and go for ~20 which is a span of 2 solar cycles. But with the speed that parts of the earth is changing I'm certainly starting to think 12 years is more than adequate for betting purposes.

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I think the point of this thread is to make a bet regarding what's causing global warming, not that there is global warming. With that thought in mind how do we make bets on the cause?

[wacki]

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I think the point of this thread is to make a bet regarding what's causing global warming, not that there is global warming. With that thought in mind how do we make bets on the cause?

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Well one way to make the bet is to negate other external factors. For example: "if the suns irradiance stays the same within +/- 1 watt per square meter or +/- 0.07%, the cosmic rays exhibit no trend, and there are no explanatory orbital trends then the bet is on. If there is a deviation in any of these factors then the bet is off".

If the challenger can't provide an explanation for the warming ahead of time then he's a denier and not a skeptic. The first step in the scientific method is to create a testable hypothesis.

That is how I'd create a more scientific bet. Also a large amount of these skeptics used to claim global cooling and some still do. There are plenty of "cooler heads" to bet against. Now that it's obvious that the cooling won't happen many of the more reasonable skeptics have changed their position to "it's just going to be a little bit of warming". There is even a trend forming now where they are saying "the warming will be good for us". The most common argument with this is the CO2 fertilization. But recent experiments (15 years of testing) have shown that this argument is bogus and only applies to fertilized indoor plants due to a variety of bottleneck reasons. Here is an example of a free air CO2 tower setup:



So the "big warming is good for us" skeptics backtrack to little warming. Every year theres a new gap in knowledge that the skeptics circle around and every year that another hole gets filled in. Just reading the history of these skeptics it amazes me how often they change their position just to fit an ideology.

[John Kilduff]

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Well one way to make the bet is to negate other external factors. For example: "if the suns irradiance stays the same within +/- 1 watt per square meter or +/- 0.07%, the cosmic rays exhibit no trend, and there are no explanatory orbital trends then the bet is on. If there is a deviation in any of these factors then the bet is off".

If the challenger can't provide an explanation for the warming ahead of time then he's a denier and not a skeptic. The first step in the scientific method is to create a testable hypothesis.


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This approach would assume, would it not(?), that all factors are known and quantifiable.

[adios]

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Well one way to make the bet is to negate other external factors. For example: "if the suns irradiance stays the same within +/- 1 watt per square meter or +/- 0.07%, the cosmic rays exhibit no trend, and there are no explanatory orbital trends then the bet is on. If there is a deviation in any of these factors then the bet is off".

If the challenger can't provide an explanation for the warming ahead of time then he's a denier and not a skeptic. The first step in the scientific method is to create a testable hypothesis.


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This approach would assume, would it not(?), that all factors are known and quantifiable.

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Yes it would. I'd be more interested in making a bet on who's got the best climate model FWIW.

[wacki]

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Well one way to make the bet is to negate other external factors. For example: "if the suns irradiance stays the same within +/- 1 watt per square meter or +/- 0.07%, the cosmic rays exhibit no trend, and there are no explanatory orbital trends then the bet is on. If there is a deviation in any of these factors then the bet is off".

If the challenger can't provide an explanation for the warming ahead of time then he's a denier and not a skeptic. The first step in the scientific method is to create a testable hypothesis.


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This approach would assume, would it not(?), that all factors are known and quantifiable.

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No, not if your intent it to separate the scientists from the frauds. What separates skeptics from deniers is a quantifiable and testable hypothesis. If they can't provide a testable hypothesis then they are operating by blind faith and not science. They might as well say "Zues was angry and he heated up the earth. Don't ask me how, he works in mysterious ways".

Btw, I could easily expand on this bet. Just in case you wanted to increase the specificity we could bet on all of these at the same time:

1) Argo temperature records
2) Surface record temps averaged out over a 5 year mean
3) Polar amplification (north an south poles heat up faster)
4) Stratospheric cooling combined with tropospheric warming
5) Sea surface temperature increase (skin layer is a sign of long wave forcing)
6) Continued radiant energy imbalance. This is a massive smoking gun. (it will actually increase but I *think* that's hard to measure on such a short timespan. Dunno will have to check the accuracy of the satellites.)
7) Comparison to James Hansen's model
8) Decreased global ice balance
9) Glacier melt through thermal conductance and not sublimation

If you understand the physics you would understand why all of these observations are such a powerful smoking gun that points toward greenhouse gases.

[AlexM]

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Well one way to make the bet is to negate other external factors. For example: "if the suns irradiance stays the same within +/- 1 watt per square meter or +/- 0.07%, the cosmic rays exhibit no trend, and there are no explanatory orbital trends then the bet is on. If there is a deviation in any of these factors then the bet is off".

If the challenger can't provide an explanation for the warming ahead of time then he's a denier and not a skeptic. The first step in the scientific method is to create a testable hypothesis.


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This approach would assume, would it not(?), that all factors are known and quantifiable.

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No, not if your intent it to separate the scientists from the frauds. What separates skeptics from deniers is a quantifiable and testable hypothesis. If they can't provide a testable hypothesis then they are operating by blind faith and not science.

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Indeed. Kind of like the theories explaining why CO2 rises follow global warming in historical data intead of preceding it that come from the "CO2 is BAD" camp.

[wacki]

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Indeed. Kind of like the theories explaining why CO2 rises follow global warming in historical data intead of preceding it that come from the "CO2 is BAD" camp.

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I hope you realize that James Hansen predicted the lag years before the first ice core was dug up. If you read that paper he attributes the lag to the "trigger effect" of Milankovitch cycles. To use the lag argument the way you do is to display a great deal of ignorance with regard to feedback cycles.

As a side note James Hansen, for the first time in his published carrier, *might* have been wrong. There is a paper which is about to be published that passed review and claims that CO2 actually coincides or even leads the temp increases. If that paper passes the reproducibility tests then we will have a lot of investigating to do because the global warming theory actually makes *MORE* sense if it lags the temperature increase which is merely triggered by Milankovitch cycles and multiplied by albedo effects of melting ice.

So as a skeptic/denier I suggest you do a complete flip flop and start arguing that CO2 actually LEADS the temp increases. That is unless you are merely talking to the uneducated masses and not somebody that actually knows what they are talking about. If you make the consensus debunking CO2 LEAD argument then you will actually have at least one credible argument.

-late for a date, see you in tomorrow afternoon...

[adios]

So you're stating that you believe Hansen's climate model is very accurate apparently. I'm not sure there's enough predictions from the model to make that claim but I'm sure you'll tell me I'm wrong.

Just to elaborate, here's an excerpt from a source that seems to support Hansen's findings:

Commentary on the debate between James Hansen and Patrick Michaels, November 1998

What struck me most when reading the transcript was the very different notions contained within of what is proper climate change science. Patrick Michaels (PM) seemed to adopt a strongly empirically-oriented view of climate science, in which hypotheses are tested against good data sets. Yet PM’s approach downplays the vital role of climate models, without which the question under debate cannot really be tackled. (After all, observations of the past and their correspondence or not with climate models’ simulations of the past, tell us little per se about the future.) From PM’s perspective, it is appropriate to put a great deal of onus on the match between observations of temperature and other climate variables and that predicted from the simulations of climate models. If there is a large discrepancy, the case for past and future anthropogenic climate change as suggested by climate models is significantly undermined according to this viewpoint. PM does not appear to ascribe any capacity to climate models for simulating the physical (and chemical and biological) processes which are responsible for generating climate change. If one ascribes some predictive capacity to climate models because of the physical and empirical understanding and knowledge which lies behind them, then PM’s criticisms are less convincing. They are less convincing because PM does not provide us with an alternative method or approach
for thinking about future climate change due to human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. The critique is also less convincing because the observations upon which PM draws his case are not good enough to bear the weight of the argument he wishes to make.

As James Hansen (JH) notes at several points, it is no good comparing climate model simulations against short observational records (10–20 years). Longer time-series of observations would be required for PM’s case against the models to be convincing on this basis. It is interesting that JH does not specify what sort of observational records(how long, with what coverage, including which climate variables, etc) would be needed before the case for or against the ability of climate model’s to simulate past
climate would become more convincing. Perhaps the modellers do need to be more up front about what empirical and observational statements would be required for that community to really question their models and the plethora of theories, approximations, data and so forth which goes into making a climate model.

Apparently Hansen states himself that observations made over 10-20 year time periods don't say too much about the predictive nature of climate models. If that's the case (and I'm fairly certain that it is), then touting the accuracy of such a model over such a time period is bogus, just as bogus as pointing out that a model was incorrect over such a time period.

I want to be able to make a bet such that the variables that affect model are specified, we plug those variables in in 50 years from now (that may be too short of a time period) and see which model was the most accurate over that time period.