Why even climate science denialist Marc Morano knows not to bet against global warming datahttp://www.theguardian.com/environm...-knows-not-to-bet-against-global-warming-data
Research shows that since 1970, bets against global warming would have always lost
If betting really is a mug’s game, then
betting against global warming is starting to look like an activity for the grandest of mugs.
A game for the sort of mug who could, right now, be looking forward to receipt of a squidrillion dollars in return for handing over their bank details to someone they just met over email.
Earlier this week, it turned out one of America’s most prominent and active deniers of the dangers of climate change was no mug when it came to putting some money on the table.
Marc Morano, of the conservative think tank the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), had turned down two bets on global warming worth $20,000.
The bets were an offering from TV science pundit and commentator Bill Nye, whose name is rarely written without his rhyming epithet “the science guy”.
Nye offered to bet Morano that the current year, 2016, would be among the ten hottest ever recorded using conventional observations. The second was that the current decade would be the warmest on record.
Morano said the bets were “silly” and that it was “obvious” he would lose.
In an email to me, Morano further said the hottest year on record, 2015, was “barely a tenth of a degree” above the previous record (which happens to have been 2014). He also suggested that official figures from US government agencies had been “adjusted”.
...
But anyway, back to that mug’s game of betting against global warming.
Back in October, a research paper was published in the Royal Society’s 350-year-old journal, Philosophical Transactions A, that looked at the prospects of bets on global warming.
In the paper, Australian climate scientist Dr James Risbey, of the CSIRO, and colleagues looked back at global temperatures from the late 19th century to present day.
They wanted to find out what would have happened to bets made each year that the next 15 years would be warmer than the previous 15 years.
They found that from about 1970 onwards, the person betting on the world getting warmer would have won. As the paper noted:
The fact that so few bets have actually been taken against greenhouse warming implies that the level of actual resistance to greenhouse theory by climate contrarians is not as strong as claimed.
The analysis of betting strategies here shows that contrarians are rational insofar as they are not betting against greenhouse warming….
Bets against greenhouse warming are largely hopeless now and that is widely understood.
In January this year, British climate science sceptic/denier/contrarian Sir Alan Rudge admitted he’d been a “mug” for betting Cambridge University’s Dr Chris Hope £1000 that 2015 would be at least 0.1C cooler than 2008...
So anytime from about 1970 onwards, if you had placed a bet against the world warming in the following decade, then you’d have lost your cash. Lewandowsky concludes:
Bets are far from a triviality or merely a form of entertainment over a pint in the pub.
On the contrary, bets have been used for centuries to reveal people’s actual preferences in arenas such as economics or cognitive science. Anyone unwilling to take a financial risk on their position probably does not hold that position very strongly. It is therefore quite notable that people who deny the science of climate change are unwilling to back their position with money.
The widespread reluctance to engage in bets by people who deny climate science suggests that their public rhetoric differs from their actual knowledge, and that they know full well that any such bet would be hopeless.
