Climate Change

[Aractus]

Let's see how the David Evans vs Brian Schmidt climate bet is going... first a bit of background about the bet. Their bet was wagered in 2007 at the height of global warming alarmism. By investing heavily into measures to reduce anthropogenic climate change, governments around the world are betting heavily on anthropogenic climate change being real. Evans evidently realised this and thought it would be a good idea for sceptics such as himself to bet against climate change. For the record - I don't think that was a good idea. I'll explain why shortly.

Their bet as mentioned was established in 2007, and bets on 10, 15, and 20 year climate trends based on 5-year averaged data against the reference year 2007. The central betline temperature is +0.15°C with a +0.02°C void margin. In other words neither of them wins the bet if the temperature increase per decade is between 0.13-0.17°C. If temperatures increase more than this Brian wins, and if they decrease less David wins. They also have a 2:1 secondary bet but we won't bother with those details here. The reference is the averaged global surface temperature of 2005-2009 ("2007") compared against 2015-19 ("2017"), 2020-24 ("2022"), and finally 2025-29 ("2027"). While this might seem complicated, it really isn't - they're comparing 2007 against 2017, 2022, and 2027, and in order to account for yearly fluctuations in temperature they're taking a 5 year average.

Here is a helpful visualisation of where they are now with their bet, with just this year to go to find the true average for the first betting period:


(Source).

Some of those numbers are slightly off when looking at GISTEMPv3 (and even more off when looking at v4). Nevertheless things don't look good for David right now:

+.613 ... 2007 (Baseline)
+.685 ... 2012 (not in bet period)
+.890 ... 2017 (absent 2019 data)

At this point 2019 would need to be colder than 2008 in order for Brian to loose the first bet, which makes it almost certain he will win it. But note the 5-year period centred on 2012 that is not in their bet - the bet would have marginally voided. This is something he reflected upon on his blog:

The Rashomon aspect comes from whether the bet looks like good news or bad news depending on your focus. I'm winning the first two months of the five year period from 2015 to 2019, which is good for me but not all that definitive. Prior to 2015, comparing years that didn't count, I was losing the bets, and prior to 2014 I was losing them badly.

Here is a visualisation adjusted to Hautbois' table with the 2018 data added:



The two of them both agree that if Brian were to loose both the later bets then it would represent a serious problem with the science of climate change. As interesting as this bet is, even by the end of the 20-year bet (to be calculated almost 23 years after they placed the bet), it is still a short-term window. Really neither of them can claim to have proven anything by the end, which is why I don't think it was ever a good idea to place a bet of this kind - unless your sole goal was to show how ridiculous it is to gamble with taxpayer money on this.

So what's the state of the science right now? I must admit I'm not on top of it at this moment. But the alarmisim is continuing, and I do know about the recent oceangate scandal. An article was published Nov 1 in Nature, Resplandy et al 2018. I might add that the article is pay-walled. In the article the authors boldly claim: (1.) their data is high-precision, (2.) that it showed that ocean temperatures rose 60% more than previous estimates, (5.) that an addition 25% emission cuts will be required to stay within the 2°C target, (4.) that their data is useful for informing climate change policy makers, (5.) it included a press release from one of the universities involved sprucing the research paper and citing the author's findings as fact. As I've said many times - you can't argue with facts. Facts are the basic information that inform us about everything else in the world. So claiming something is a fact when it's not is quite serious.

Well indeed their data was cooked. Even the journal has acknowledged this: "19 November 2018 Editor’s Note: We would like to alert readers that the authors have informed us of errors in the paper. An implication of the errors is that the uncertainties in ocean heat content are substantially underestimated. We are working with the authors to establish the quantitative impact of the errors on the published results, at which point in time we will provide a further update.".

And who found this serious error? None other than so-called "climate denier" Nic Lewis.

As I mentioned at the top, I think it's stupid to bet on climate change - including by spending trillions of dollars to curb fossil fuel emissions. Unfortunately we have a closed-loop confirmation bias with the climate models, and I don't see that changing any time soon. Really we can learn much more from the failed models then we ever can from the so-called "successful" models. 25 years from now the models that correctly predicted the trend from 2019-2044 will be held up as reliable models, which I think is absurd. We don't use correlational data to prove cause-and-effect - for example the just-published research paper Mossavar-Rahmani 2019 does not prove a causational relationship between artificially sweetened beverages and risk of mortality, and nor do the authors claim that it does. Yet this exact same type of data is claimed by climate scientists to "prove" their theory about anthropogenic climate change.