What Happened to a Climate Change Denier's 10-Year Wager? 96
Slashdot reader Layzej writes:
In January of 2011, Slashdot reported on AccuWeather meteorologist Joe Bastardi's wager for climate scientists. He bet the earth would "cool .1 to .2 Celsius in the next ten years, according to objective satellite data." He later backed down when the wager was accepted, saying "With the way the article is couched, which I did not know would turn into a bet, I think that if I am wrong, then I will not have the 10k to bet anyway...since it seems that 35 years of forecasting is now on the line with this. I have never bet on the weather before, and I think since it now appears I am betting my entire livelihood on this, then that is enough."
It's a good thing too. The wager would have come due in January of 2021. As it turns out, the linear trend of global mean temperatures shows the earth actually warmed by just over 0.5C over the period according to satellite data.
It's a good thing too. The wager would have come due in January of 2021. As it turns out, the linear trend of global mean temperatures shows the earth actually warmed by just over 0.5C over the period according to satellite data.
The house always wins. (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure a farmer could have told him the weather is a poor thing to bet on.
Re:The house always wins. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The house always wins. (Score:4, Informative)
"Freeman Dyson, was very skeptical (note spelling) about the climate alarmism" Over 95 % of Climate Scientists are not at all skeptical, they can read the stats. These are the people who do climate science for a living, not a dilettante in the field like Dyson.
Re: (Score:3)
Now if only we had historical climate records going back further than 150 years. Then weâ(TM)d be able to be more confident in our level of alarmism.
I wish it were possible to tell irony from cluelessness from insight, but as is often the case on the internet, it's impossible here. I am not even sure that the person posting this knows whether he is trying to be ironic or not.
The quick reply is that we do have historical data on climate, but the farther back you go, the larger the error bars in the both the temperature and the time (and the harder it is to distinguish whether a given reading-- an ice core, for example-- is part of a local, a regional, or
Re: (Score:1)
Scientists can read the stats, but obviously you are not able to understand what science sais:
CO2 has no effect on climate. It has not been warming significantly for a decade (or more).
Global warming is primarily caused by sun cycles. The global warming of the last century is neither special nor dramatic.
Re:The house always wins. (Score:4, Interesting)
Physics doesn't have much to do with it.
I suppose it is also largely dependent on how much CO2 we emit, but nobody thought we would do away with fossil fuels inside of one decade. we went from 390.10 ppm CO2 to 414.24 PPM.
We can calculate the forcing as F= 5.35 * ln (C/C0) Wm*-2= 5.35 * ln(414.24/390.10) = ~0.3 Wm*-2. Bastardi anticipated that solar output would fall and that solar fluctuations dominate any greenhouse signal. He was right on the first part. Solar output was down ~0.05 Wm^-2 compared to the previous decade. But that hardly puts a dent in the warming from caused by increased greenhouse gasses.
Re:The house always wins. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The house always wins. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: The house always wins. (Score:2)
We understand the physics [Re:The house...] (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the phrase "climate science" is a misnomer. Science uses scientific method which is based on observation and repeatability of hypothesis.
Although you may not be able to see it in the popular discussion, this is of course exactly what atmospheric scientists do. I think you don't have good grasp at just how much atmospheric science data is collected. We have very very good measurements of both the atmosphere and of the forcing functions (like solar intensity and cloud coverage, and of course also carbon dioxide fraction).
We also have pretty good measurements and models of the atmosphere of other planets.
(and, of course, these are all physics based models, and the physics is pretty well understood.)
So called "climate science" purports to predict the future, which is not observable, so it's hardly a science.
You are telling me that orbital mechanics-- which allows you to predict the positions of planets (and satellites) based on Kepler's laws of motion, is not a science?
In fact, atmospheric scientists do exactly what other scientists do: they make observations and compare the observations to models based on well-understood physics.
Climatologists make computer models and pretend that those computer models accurately predict the future
The only thing you ever really see in the popular press is the overall global temperature predictions, but that is probably the least significant thing. Basically, atmospheric science is about understanding the physics of how energy flow in the atmosphere drives atmospheric motion, in the Earth's atmosphere and the atmospheres of other planets.
Their track record is not great.
The track record of climate modeling predictions has been remarkably good. Look bacl at the published predictions in the literature, starting with the 1979 National Academy of Sciences report, "Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment", which gives a high, low, and median estimates for the effect of CO2 on climate, based on the models of the 1970s (primarily derivatives of Manabe and Wetherald's 1969 model). The prediction is that warming due to carbon dioxide would result in between 0.59 and 1.04 degrees C of warming from the 1979 value of carbon dioxide to the 2020 value, with the median prediction of 0.82. The measured value in 2020 compared to 1979 is 0.92 degrees C of warming; very close to the median and well within error bars.
this is a technological problem [Re:We underst...] (Score:2)
.Although you may not be able to see it in the popular discussion, this is of course exactly what atmospheric scientists do. I think you don't have good grasp at just how much atmospheric science data is collected. We have very very good measurements of both the atmosphere and of the forcing functions (like solar intensity and cloud coverage, and of course also carbon dioxide fraction).We also have pretty good measurements and models of the atmosphere of other planets. (and, of course, these are all physics based models, and the physics is pretty well understood.)
.
We are talking about politically motivated bleak predictions of the future.
Then we are talking about different things. I am talking about the science. The science is real. The politics are, in fact, worth discussing: but the insane garbage dumpster of people shouting that the science isn't real has completely drowned out reasonable and necessary discussion of the policy and politics.
Physics is one thing. Models of the planet climate are something completely different.
Climate models are all physics based. Since climate is indeed complicated, there are error bars in the climate predictions, and these error bars are listed in all the actual science publications. B
No, scientists did not think an ice age was coming (Score:3)
Let me remind you, at the end of the 20th century, climatologists were convinced that a new Ice Age is coming.
That pseudo "fact" from the climate denialists has been debunked over and over.
No, climate scientists were not "convinced" that a new ice age was coming. "That is a myth.There was one prominent story in the popular press that gave that misleading impression, but nothing in the actual science.
A good reference is the American Meteorological Society: http://journals.ametsoc.org/do... [ametsoc.org]
Re: (Score:2)
...In addition to that, we're discussing politics that pretends to be based on science. The suggested policies would killtens of thousands of jobs, just like Biden did by vetoing the pipeline, they would also make energy much more expensive and would lower our quality of life rather dramatically.
Ah, suddenly your real argument shows up. You aren't interested in the science at all, you are making an argument that policies would be bad.
I have no objection to that. We need more discussion about policy and politics. The constant drumbeat of "It's all a hoax or else the scientists are all stupid, maybe both" serves no point exce
Re: The house always wins. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Paywalled. You can look at figure 2 here [carbonbrief.org] to see how Hanson's 1980 projections held up: https://www.carbonbrief.org/an... [carbonbrief.org].
Long story short, he overestimated rate of CO2 increase, but underestimated the impact of rising CO2, and came out with something about right. So, right answer but for the wrong reason. We learn from it nonetheless.
Of course, these are projections and not predictions. We get to decide how much CO2 we will emit. The models can only say "if we do this, we should expect that." We
The original work [Re: The house always wins.] (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks for pointing out the paywall. But I think people may benefit from reading the original work for themselves.
https://www.cato.org/commentar [cato.org]...
Uh, Cato institute [wikipedia.org] is an ideological "think tank" that has the stated objective of promoting libertarian ideology; it was founded and supported by the Koch Corporation, an oil company. This is not "the original work", it is not even science of any sort. Everything they publish has no goal other than to push libertarian politics and promote the interests of oil companies; they do not even pretend to be science in any way, much less "original work."
If you want the "original work" discussed, that would be Hansen et al. 1981: https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/doc... [nasa.gov]
If you want to compare it to measurements, there are any number of sources for that data. Here, for example: http://berkeleyearth.org/janua... [berkeleyearth.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Yes? He made that point himself?
duplicated link [Re: The house always wins.] (Score:2)
And then there is this https://www.wsj.com/articles/t [wsj.com]...
That is identical to the Cato institute press release which you linked earlier. The Cato institute is a libertarian "think tank" devoted to promoting libertarian politics; it is not a scientific organization of any sort.
The comparison of prediction to measurement was linked earlier, here: https://www.carbonbrief.org/an... [carbonbrief.org]
Climate != Weather (Score:3)
I'm sure a farmer could have told him the weather is a poor thing to bet on.
He was betting on the climate not the weather [noaa.gov]. He may now be trying to pass it off as a bet on the weather but if he was betting on the global average temperature over 10 years that's most definitely climate.
Re: (Score:2)
From reading the things he's said, I'm not sure he really understands the difference.
His arguments mostly seem to boil down to "weather is complicated" and "CO2 is only present in tiny amounts."
Re: (Score:2)
Well (Score:2)
“The scientific approach is you see the other argument, you put forward predictions about where things are going to go, and you test them,” he says. “That is what I have done. I have said the earth will cool .1 to .2 Celsius in the next ten years, according to objective satellite data.”
Well, guesses aren't really the scientific approach, but if you generously call that a hypothesis then I guess it's been rejected. Sounds like he's now going to claim it's all just chance.
His life savings? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Gambler (Score:2)
His whole life savings is $10k?
Well, he clearly likes to gamble so perhaps this should not be too surprising.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
This cartoon is brilliant.
It's neat, yes.
It's nice to be in the in-crowd of smart cartoon readers.
You're not smart, though. You probably think you are, but you're not. Sorry.
Re: Slow news day? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
He had me at, "If only it were in crayon it would be perfect".
If only there were things called "citations" to prove people wrong instead of poo-pooing.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)
> The climate is always changing. It changed 1 billion years ago, 1000 years ago, and today and all the times in between sometimes even more rapidly than it does today.
"Planes change altitudes all the time. There's no reason to believe we're about to crash - just a few hours ago we were ascending!"
> Did you know the earth used to be much hotter than it was today billions of years ago and it didn't even have any humans or cars
I did! And you know how we know that? Science. The same science that says the Earth is now warming, and that after accounting for every variable they could, can only be warming the way it is due to human activity. In particular, human activity over the past ~200 years or so. It's the exact same science.
> I guess those bacteria worked in factories too much
Rather, there was a lot more CO2 in the air back then... until plants became a thing, and started absorbing all that CO2 and sequestering it as biomass. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations went down, planet cooled, and long story short humans evolved... then humans started digging up the ancient biomass because it burns really good, and in burning it have been putting all that ancient CO2 back into the atmosphere.
So thanks to human activity we are putting the Earth back on track to become as hot as it was billions of years ago - you know, before life as we know it today could exist?
=Smidge=
Re:Slow news day? (Score:4, Interesting)
A more down to earth measure is to ask the fishermen along the East Coast of the U.S. They report they must travel farther north for the fish since the fish have a vote in this over warmer or cooler water.
Or you could ask the potato farmers in Michigan. They now cannot rely upon cool weather to keep their crops from spoiling before being sent to potato chip and other plants. They are having to install refrigeration units.
These are only two down to earth effects, there are plenty more for the denialists to deny.
Re: (Score:3)
A more down to earth measure is to ask the fishermen along the East Coast of the U.S. They report they must travel farther north for the fish since the fish have a vote in this over warmer or cooler water.
Or you could ask the potato farmers in Michigan. They now cannot rely upon cool weather to keep their crops from spoiling before being sent to potato chip and other plants. They are having to install refrigeration units.
These are only two down to earth effects, there are plenty more for the denialists to deny.
Fishermen along the East Coast, potato farmers in Michigan!?! Ha, fish and chips come from restaurants, not Michigan and this "east coast" you speak of. You need to spend less time listening to the fake news, I think.
Re: (Score:2)
> These are only two down to earth effects, there are plenty more for the denialists to deny.
Yeah? Well, it was cold in Texas! So much for global warming!
=Smidge=
Re: (Score:2)
This is something that always surprises me. I grew up in a farming community. The farmers are constantly complaining that their crops are in danger because the snow doesn't stay anymore and spring runoff barely happens, and it "just doesn't get cold anymore like when I was a kid."
And they'll also vehemently tell you that climate change isn't a thing.
Re: (Score:1)
No one denies that climate changes.
Thinking that CO2 *causes* global warming is frankly retarded. It is a transparent gas. Correlation is not causation. Look it up - no one is hiding the information from you that CO2 is transparent.
Re: Slow news day? (Score:2)
You know what else? The universe was a lot hotter 13.8 billion years ago. Hence AGW is not a thing. etc
It just goes on and on.
Re: (Score:1)
That is not science. But the science is simple.
The correlation between CO2 growth and temperature growth does not imply the direction of causality or any causality.
CO2 is transparent. It does not cause any greenhouse effect.
The greenhouse effect really is convection, not reflection, meaning that it works by keeping the warm air in. I'm not seeing any glass dome.
The actual reflection in the atmosphere, which is not a greenhouse effect, but may still keep warmth in, is caused by water vapor. It is not transpa
Re: (Score:2)
> CO2 is transparent. It does not cause any greenhouse effect.
Much like an IR filter on a camera lens is transparent to visible light but not IR, or the silica glass envelope of a fluorescent lamp is transparent to visible light but not UV, CO2 is transparent to visible light but not to several specific wavelengths of IR. Meaning, if you shine infrared light through a "transparent" box filled with CO2, a significant portion of the light will be absorbed, causing the box to heat up.
> is caused by wate
0.5 C? (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who has followed this topic closely, this number is much higher than I would expect to see . You can see on this NOAA chart [noaa.gov] that the global average temperature of 2011-20 is only about 0.2 C higher than 2001-2010.
Maybe a best-fit linear trend of RSS data shows 0.5 C warming in the last decade, but trend estimation on such a short time period is excessively influenced by large year-to-year variations. Also, any "climate skeptic" will have no trouble dismissing RSS data - they prefer UAH, a different interpretation of the same satellite data that has been prepared by contrarian scientists Roy Spencer and John Christy.
Since humans live on land, I do think it's worth nothing that global warming on land is much faster than on the ocean [twimg.com] but since oceans cover 71% of the Earth, the ocean signal is weighted much higher.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
it takes more energy to heat ocean than land. That energy translates into changes in ocean currents and alters the course or periodic weather systems.
Re: (Score:2)
As someone who has followed this topic closely, this number is much higher than I would expect to see . You can see on this NOAA chart [noaa.gov] that the global average temperature of 2011-20 is only about 0.2 C higher than 2001-2010. Maybe a best-fit linear trend of RSS data shows 0.5 C warming in the last decade, but trend estimation on such a short time period is excessively influenced by large year-to-year variations.
Fair point. Either way, his prediction was the right order of magnitude, but in the wrong direction.
Re: (Score:3)
No... you don't get to claim that you're partially right when you give the wrong answer and it happens to contain one of the same digits as the correct answer. That's not how it works.
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any "climate skeptic" will have no trouble dismissing RSS data - they prefer UAH, a different interpretation of the same satellite data that has been prepared by contrarian scientists Roy Spencer and John Christy.
They show roughly the same change over the period. 0.505 for UAH, and 0.518 for RSS. - https://woodfortrees.org/data/... [woodfortrees.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but the link you provided seems to show a mean of 0.139312 for UAH, and 0.579366 for RSS. I'm not sure if that's degrees per year. As for you numbers, they appear to come from the the mean squares slope, which for UAH is 0.0504865 per year and RSS is 0.0517871 per year but I don't think that's the same thing as degree per year, and somehow your numbers are off by an order of magnitude.
Re: (Score:3)
Mean doesn't have any meaning in this context since we're talking about anomalies and not absolutes. It's the slope you want to look at:
RSS= #Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0517871 per year
UAH= #Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0504865 per year
Re: (Score:2)
Silence from the whiners.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure but the slope is not 0.5C per year like the GP claimed.
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satellite measurements [Re:0.5 C?] (Score:2)
Something to keep in mind is that the climate models being discussed are air temperature at the surface, while the RSS and UAH analyses of satellite data look at measurements of radiance temperatures averaged over 0 to 12 km.
(I'll also note that both of these are microwave radiance measurements. There are also infrared satellite temperature measurements, which somehow don't get discussed since they're not controversial).
The Wikipedia article has a good overview explanation of satellite temperature measurem
Re: (Score:2)
Here's UAH, RSS, GIS, and BEST all on one graph. They all show the same thing: https://woodfortrees.org/plot/... [woodfortrees.org]
Temperatures rose significantly over the decade that Bastardi predicted they would fall.
Re: (Score:2)
You can look at stats or you can look at Greenland. Greenland is melting. I'm guessing it isn't getting cooler up there.
Looks like someone else is losing a bet (Score:1)
Greenland is melting. I'm guessing it isn't getting cooler up there.
Well according to this chart, it was in fact getting cooler [tradingeconomics.com] over the last ten years in Greenland before 2015... and I can't find anything year-wise since then, just a lot of articles about ice sheet melting (which is based a lot of warmer oceans) but very little actual climate data since then. Hmm!
From the report that we had, we see the maximum lows were a little warmer, but the maximum highs are a bit cooler. But what I can't find, is if
Greenland [Re:Looks like someone else is losing... (Score:2)
Greenland is melting. I'm guessing it isn't getting cooler up there.
Well according to this chart, it was in fact getting cooler [tradingeconomics.com] over the last ten years in Greenland before 2015... .
I'm not sure that "tradingeconomics.com" is a site I'd go to first for science data, but I went to the link and about all I can see is that the annual variation is so high that it's hard to see the trend.
The person you're responding to, however, talked about Greenland melting. Turns out that the gravity measurement satellites (primarily GRACE and GRACE-Follow on) can measure the total mass of ice on Greenland pretty well.
The answer is, yes, Greenland is melting.
2002-2020 data article here: https://svs.gsfc. [nasa.gov]
Re: (Score:2)
Going from the averages of "2001-2010" to "2011-2020" is a difference between data points separated by ten years, not twenty. It makes sense that the 20-year difference from 2001 to 2021 would be at least twice the magnitude (turns out to be more because it's accelerating).
Coward (Score:2)
He backed down from the bet, the bastardi.
better headline (Score:4, Funny)
Who cares about this guy. (Score:3)
I'm still waiting for Mcafee to eat his own dick on national television.
Meteorologist not betting on weather (Score:2)
If a meteorologist is not willing to bet on his expert opinion, that tells you something. It would be like a civil engineer building a bridge and saying "I'm not willing to bet anything that the bridge will not fall apart in the next 5 years".
Re: Meteorologist not betting on weather (Score:2)
This is vitally important news!! (Score:2)
Progress (Score:2)
I'm so happy things are warming up. Let's keep it going!
Bursting bubbles (Score:3, Interesting)
Not a wager. It was presented as fact.
History's sword slices both ways.
Re:Bursting bubbles (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh huh. Kinda like how climate change denialists insist scientists were warning about a new ice age in the 70's - except that didn't happen either.
Re: (Score:2)
You had climate scientists as teachers in college?
Wow.
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Says something about the college you went to, tbh. Or maybe how well you paid attention in class.
Here are some assessments of how old climate models actually did. tl;dr: pretty well.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/an... [carbonbrief.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Climate "scientists" were telling us in college in the 80's that the polar ice caps would melt by the year 2000
No, they weren't. We know what climate scientists were telling us in the 1980s. We have records. In the 1980s they were predicting "4 to 17 centimeters" of sea level rise by 2020.
Yes, that's a very large set of error bars. That's how you can tell real science from popular bullshit: real science has error bars.
Ref: https://books.google.com/books... [google.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I think that reads 4 to 17 centimeters by 2000, not 2020. It looks like we tracked towards the low end of that projection: https://www.climate.gov/news-f... [climate.gov]
IPCC AR1 projected SLR 8.7 to 28.9 cm between 1985 and 2030 (see chart on page 20: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/asset... [www.ipcc.ch] ). We're at ~10 cm with 10 years left on the clock, but it seems we'll come up short of the best estimate of 18.3 cm
I suppose that's how science advances. Assumptions can be reviewed and refined and better projections developed.
Re: (Score:2)
The data has been bad for years.
We'd love to correct it so feel free to point out which of the numbers are wrong.
Conspiracy theory [Re:garbage in garbage out] (Score:2)
The data has been bad for years.
You are aware that there are over a dozen groups on four continents that are doing global temperature reconstructions?
Your conspiracy theory is that they are all liars?
How about the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project http://berkeleyearth.org/ [berkeleyearth.org]
This is the independend re-analysis of temperature of which Anthony Watts (the "wattsupwiththat" guy) said he would trust ("I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.") ... right up until the results were a
This doesn't mean anything... (Score:1)
The trend is from 120 monthly readings (Score:2)
The two "samples" are actually just the start and end of the least squares trend line. The least spares trend line is calculated from 120 monthly global mean temperature measurements. Here's the full dataset: https://woodfortrees.org/plot/... [woodfortrees.org] .
Click "raw data" at the bottom to get at the data.
Re: (Score:1)
God Bless You.
Plot all of the data. The point of me suggesting that someone plot the data is multipurpose. It isn't just to get them to look at the actual data. It is to get them to look at all of the data and to start asking questions about the data they find. I did a heat map of the planet from 1750 to the present. It was for a website called FreeCodeCamp. I followed the instructions and learned how to use D3.js. It was useful.
I have downloaded and plotted ALL of the data. Anyone who has knows about 1750.