Global Warming—wanna bet?
It’s “put up or shut up” (as it were) where global warming’s concerned. Two solar scientists put their money where their mouths are and bet $10,000 that the earth will be cooler a decade from now.
While climatologists are universal in agreeing that the earth has been in a warming trend since the end of the “Little Ice Age” 150 years ago, both the causes of warming and the long-term trend are much disputed among scientists more removed from the political-ideological groups asserting man-made global warming.
Two Russian solar scientists, in fact— Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev of the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in Irkutsk—have bet $10,000 (a not-inconsiderable sum for two Russian scientists in their current economy) against the trend. Their bet is with British climate expert, Dr. James Annan, who works on computer modeling of climate change.
In this Guardian(UK) article, the solar scientists are cited as asserting that they “believe that global temperatures are driven more by changes in the sun’s activity than by the emission of greenhouse gases.”
Apparently Mashnich and Bashkirtsev are betting on less sunspot activity between now and 2018, when their bet is up.
Opinion: in the highly-politicized atmosphere in which scientific inquiry is done today, I think having scientists willing to put their own money—rather than using the media to extort money from public coffers for their political/ideological ends—on the line is a healthy thing.
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