A $10,000 bet on climate change

Preceding the now-global initiative Earth Hour was a relatively small issue regarding a wager on climate change, which I found in the Foreign Policy blog. Albeit small in a plethora of issues in the sphere international politics (perhaps because of its too-academic and “scientific” nature), its impact on the remaining fight that could ultimately save mankind cannot be downplayed.

The wager is put up by forecasting expert J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School of Business and challenges Al Gore’s climate change forecasts which he presented in the 2007 Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Armstrong, in his paper, "Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists Versus Scientific Forecasts" also challenged the results of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) saying it as “unscientific” saying his predictions were far more accurate than the previous two mentioned. (See article and related links here)

Citing The New York Times article, the UN-IPCC recently presented grim forecasts if governments fail to respond to the lingering risk on global warming: “melting ice sheets that could lead to a rapid rise in sea levels and the extinction of large numbers of species brought about by even moderate amounts of warming, on the order of 1 to 3 degrees”.

The bet would require Gore and Armstrong to deposit $10,000 into an escrow account and the prize would go to the one who has closest to the accurate predictions of temperature, over a ten-year period, in 10 different weather stations around the world. The renewed deadline was supposed to be March 26. Gore has reportedly dismissed the challenge.

Gore would have only aggravated the forecast squabbling if he accepted the wager. And it would only do the world no good. I admire the efforts of Armstrong and his colleagues, but I reserve doubts on what point they want to prove. I suck at this stuff, forecasting and statistical analysis, because I suck at math. But we face such ominous times. I know that global carbon emissions are already way more than the world can take, polar ice caps are melting at such a rapid level, a sizable portion of Antarctica has been obliterated, and God knows if the hole in the ozone layer is still the size of Australia or much bigger now.

Surely, the devastation brought about by the Hurricane Katrina and its disastrous precedents couldn’t be any more than a retributive display of nature’s wrath than it is a big and horrific danger sign that no battle for accuracy can anymore abate.