Hautbois

In 2004, contrarian meteorologist Richard Lindzen said he was willing to bet that the Earth's climate would cool over the next 20 years.   The following year c limate modeller  James Annan, who at the time was at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology,  approached Lindzen to take him up on the offer. However, a ccording to Nature in 2005 : "Annan says that Lindzen wanted odds of 50-to-1 against falling temperatures: this meant that Annan would pay out $10,000 if temperatures dropped, but receive only $200 if they rose." James Annan tried and failed to agree terms with seven other potential betting counterparts before  Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev of  the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in Irkutsk rose to the challenge. The basis of the bet was very straightforward: 2012-17 compared with 1998-2003, using  the  global surface temperature   dataset kept by   National Centers for Environmental Infor...

Between 2005-2011, several public bets were made about climate change, specifically about the rate of global warming. Typically, on one side is someone who broadly agrees with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change i.e. that global warming is real, caused by human activity (e.g. fossil fuel burning) and that things will get worse if we carry on as we are.  On the other side is what we might politely call a contrarian, who broadly disagrees with the IPCC. Typically, their view is that the world is warming less than the IPCC view, or not at all, or is about to start cooling.   Just for fun,  I've produced a scoreboard of recorded climate bets between 'warmists' and 'coolists' (for want of some better names). It shows all the bets I can find where terms were agreed by both parties and made public - in chronological order of when the bet was agreed. The warmists are clearly winning: CLIMATE BETS SCOREBOARD Coolists Warmist...