climate betting
stoat | December 9, 2013 Yay, more nonsense about sea ice: the traditional "US Navy predicts summer ice free Arctic by 201x", where this time x=6. Does anyone actually believe this rubbish? If so, I have money just sitting around, bored, twiddling its little green fingers and waiting to take your bet. If "summer ice free" means "oh yeah, not actually ice free, but less than 1 million square km" then please form an orderly line. Even odds, let's say £1k. Who's first up?
Do I see Nafeez Ahmed there? Or Wieslaw Maslowski? No? How odd.
Found by the lost [*]:
* Ed Hawkins @ed_hawkins: Brave prediction by Maslowski for…
stoat | November 26, 2012 And not before time, you might say. Sea ice this year reached a new record minimum in the Arctic (though not in the Antarctic, which begins to look wind-driven. And before you think the two trends might be opposite-and-nearly equal, look at Tamino's convenient analysis which I can never find). Which means I lost some of my bets. Now, what exactly was I betting on?
Crandles helpfully points me at Betting on sea ice: $10,000 although the $10k doesn't fall due until 2016. But in the comments (the one from 2011/07/04, since perma-linking here remains invisible to all but me) we agreed:
we are…
stoat | June 26, 2011This year's story so far: in May, I accepted some bets but was still trying to come to terms with Rob Dekker. In the comments there we came to agreement on the following:
If both NSIDC and IARC-JAXA September 2016 monthly average sea ice extent report are above 4.80 million km^2, RD pays WMC US$ 10,000. If both are below 3.10 million km^2, WMC pays RD US$ 10,000. In all other cases the bet is null and void
The numbers are a bit of a compromise, and of course the large "null gap" in the middle means a no-payment result is quite likely. Now is a sort-of good time to announce this, because this…
stoat | May 10, 2011Or perhaps part 3. I've lost track. Sea ice - and now for something just a tiny bit different refers, as does the earlier This year's sea ice. Yes, it looks like being part 3.
The above is the IJIS sea ice. Nothing very exciting at the moment (NSIDC have some nice pix. April 2011 was bang-on trend). As you recall, we're trying to agree a bet or bets. I want to bet on monthly extent and some of the others want daily. After too much equivocation, I've decided to stick to my guns: monthly it is, and if you don't like that, you'll need to find someone else to bet with. Or, you can apply a handy…
stoat | October 2, 2010Hurrah. That saves lots of effort paying :-). Not long ago it was looking bad for the good guys (i.e., me) with a "douple dip" recession of sea ice. But a strong perforcance from the boys up north in the mushy white stuff stakes saw a sharp rebound at the end of the month, leading to a monthly average for september of 4.90 (thanks for C for vigilance). As a reminder, recent years have been:
2000 9 Goddard N 6.32 4.31
2001 9 Goddard N 6.75 4.55
2002 9 Goddard N 5.96 3.98
2003 9 Goddard N 6.15 4.01
2004 9 Goddard N 6.05…
stoat | June 15, 2010Continuing from Three views of sea ice. Well, tis now mid-June, so the futurology aspect of the prediction is closing rapidly. Or so you would have thought. I've just taken £50 against CR for the ice being below 4.735 (he gets the low side) or above 4.935 (I get the high side). But my principal debt on sea ice is failing to write anything more about it. so, to remedy that!
I was going to suggest that the most interesting way of doing the pool was via Intrade. Unfortunately their Arctic sea ice pool doesn't look very interesting. The bet is "2010 greater than 2009" and is trading at around 43…
stoat | May 23, 2010The troops are getting restive. What wil happen to this year's sea ice? Rumours abound. Let's look at some pictures.
Probably the least interesting is this one from NSIDC. But it looks exciting, doesn't it. Woo-hoo, look, the sea ice now is lower than it was in 2007, that means it will be at minimum, too, doesn't it? Well no, of course not. Look at this one from AWI:
2006 was well below 2007 at this point, and turned out to be uninteresting. As far as I know, no-one believes in predicting the minimum (which, of course, is the only number anyone gives a toss about) based on previous months.…
stoat | March 22, 2010I doubt I'll be running the ever-exciting competition again this year, due to a lack of people who strongly disagree with me (i.e., the decline will be on the long term-trend, plus some error margin).
But While I'm here there appears to be some excitement from Romm over a Grauniad study about a GRL study about the role of wind forcing in sea ice loss, in particular in 2007.
The paper says
The unprecedented retreat of first-year ice during summer 2007 was enhanced by strong poleward drift over the western Arctic induced by anomalously high sea-level pressure (SLP) over the Beaufort Sea that…
stoat | January 28, 2010At some point I need to decide if I'll re-start the by-now-traditional sea ice bet for the summer. Before we start arguing over the details, remember that there is a lot of inter-annual variablity so we need to disagree *a lot* to have a meaningful bet. But at least one person has said in the comments that they feel "worried" by this years ice, so that suggests pessimism that I can exploit!
Any thoughts about what you might want to bet about, please leave a comment. My default position is going to be "will fit the 1979-2009 slope extrapolated to 2010". Bear in mind that this isn't a forecast…
stoat | March 20, 2009Via Quark Soup, a reminder to look at the sea ice data. IJIS have a nice pic http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm which is better than the cryosphere today pix. I have a somewhat different take on it to DA: looking at that pic it is clear just how exceptional 2007 was. If you look at the integrated difference from the mean from Jul-Nov approx, it is in a a league of it'sown. 2008 is low in terms of the absolute min, but that is a poor statistical measure. I'm more than ever confident that 2009 will be nothing very exceptional, and that the "new paradigm" people are going to…
stoat | February 12, 2009I was going to rant about Lord "I know what you should hear" Ahmed but that's just the religious suppressing freedom of speech, which is hardly news.
But then along comes a much more interesting rant, from Vicky Pope, about the good old Arctic sea ice. 'Apocalyptic climate predictions' mislead the public, say experts. Met Office scientists fear distorted climate change claims could undermine efforts to tackle carbon emissions. With which I agree. Recent headlines have proclaimed that Arctic summer sea ice has decreased so much in the past few years that it has reached a tipping point and will…
stoat | February 1, 2009I encountered [[J Scott Armstrong]] via his wiki entry, and the blogosphere, when he proposed a $20,000 bet with Gore (though since each side was supposed to put up $10,000 this seems like puffery from the start). JA pointed out the obvious reasons why the bet is trickery. On Armstrong's part, this seems to have developed into a website theclimatebet.com/, and its fairly clear which side they are on. The rubbish keeps coming back onto wiki, although it dies quickly.
So far so boring. Gore's basic response has been "go away I'm busy", which is fair enough. I'm slightly curious that he hasn't…
stoat | January 15, 2009Asks climatematters@columbia. But they ask it in a way that suggests they think the trend is going to be steep. So I offered them the standard bet. We'll see.
Meanwhile, anyone interested in whether 2009 is likely to be a record can get some action over at ipredict (thanks Gareth). I've bought some; current price is about 0.23. I'm not really sure what a fair price would be; I have some buy orders in. Its quite educational.
stoat | November 29, 2008Sea ice again.
I was reading Gareth who had been reading Monbiot. And so I did too. After I'd waded through the goo and the dribble about Bush, the first item of substance was A new summary of the science published since last year's Intergovernmental Panel report suggests that - almost a century ahead of schedule - the critical climate processes might have begun. Just a year ago the Intergovernmental Panel warned that the Arctic's "late-summer sea ice is projected to disappear almost completely towards the end of the 21st century ... in some models." But, as the new report by the Public…
stoat | September 23, 2008It looks like I'm safe for this year. I'm being just a teensy bit premature, but its rather unlikely to change, people want to pay up :-) and others have said it anyway (irritatingly that link will probably fade, so to quote "The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the second-lowest extent recorded since the dawn of the satellite era"). I'm basing my victory on http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm as of today.
Although I won, I didn't win by as much as I expected, so in some sense my prediction was wrong. But I'll take the cash…
stoat | September 15, 2008People have been posting comments about the sea ice again. We're close to the min, though maybe not there yet, but from http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm, which I think is the best pic available, it looks good for the good guys.
The original in this series is Betting on sea ice?
stoat | July 18, 2008Eat your hearts out real scientists :-) See here. I think its hung off a trip in the icebreaker that QS got; see his blog I get to say Bets have already been laid on whether this summer's ice loss will be more than last year's. William Connolley, a software engineer who used to model sea-ice changes at the British Antarctic Survey, has taken in roughly â¬300 (US$470) so far in the informal online pool he runs. (He bet 'no'.) Connolley points out that, even if a new record is set, that has little meaning in the long term. "We all recognize the climatological trend is downwards," he says, "but…
stoat | June 28, 2008Since RC has posted on the sea ice, maybe its a good time for an update.
From http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ we have
So its clearly going to be a close run thing. At the moment the trend line favours the good guys (that is to say, me, if you're in doubt :-) but not by much.
mt called me a "polyanna" (presumably by analogy to "polynyas") for betting on the high side. So let me clarify: my "prediction" was based purely on my reading of the statistics of the time series to-date: a record is rarely followed by another. If we have entered a new regime, then my reasonning is invalid. At the…
stoat | May 8, 2008The summary of betting on sea ice refers. If you look in my comments, you'll find any number of well intentioned people advising me that its time to close up the bets before I take a bath. But I haven't. Anyone wanting to pile in is still welcome (if you can't be bothered to look up the previous post the bet is simple: will this years Arctic sea ice extent minimum, as measured by the satellites, be less than last year? I say no).
The May 5th version of "Arctic sea ice news and analysis" provides some more fodder. I've ripped off a pic from them which I like. To me, it rather suggests no…
stoat | May 8, 2008As I said before, I don't think much of the latest prediction of cooling. But apparently , the authors take it seriously, and believe it as a prediction (pers comm). So RC has decided to see if they are serious. My expectation is that they will find some spurious excuse for wimping out (I've offered to put up $100 on the bet not being taken, with me paying out if it is taken; any offers?).
Andy Revkin covers this. The only complaint I have is that JA is being airbrushed out of the picture. Such is life.
Coming soon: betting on sea ice.
[Update: I *can* spell climate -W]