The $10,000 Global Warming Skeptic Challenge

Porters carry cores of ancient glacial ice down from the 6542m summit of Mt Sajama in Bolivia.
Porters carry cores of ancient glacial ice down from the 6542m summit of Mt Sajama in Bolivia.

The Physicist Dr. Christopher Keating has a challenge for you on his blog …

I am announcing the start of the $10,000 Global Warming Skeptic Challenge. The rules are easy:

1. I will award $10,000 of my own money to anyone that can prove, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change is not occurring;

2. There is no entry fee;

3. You must be 18 years old or older to enter;

4. Entries do not have to be original, they only need to be first;

5. I am the final judge of all entries but will provide my comments on why any entry fails to prove the point.

That’s it! I know you are not going to get rich with $10,000. But, tell me, wouldn’t you like to have a spare $10,000? After all, the skeptics all claim it is a simple matter, and it doesn’t even have to be original. If it is so easy, just cut and paste the proof from somewhere. Provide the scientific evidence and prove your point and the $10,000 is yours!

This is no joke. If someone can provide a proof that I can’t refute, using scientific evidence, then I will write them a check.

He is dead serious about this and also quite rightly does not think that he will ever need to write that cheque because he knows what the evidence is and what it is telling us right now.

When challenged to explain, he is quoted as saying … “Deniers actively claim that science is on their side and there is no proof of man-made climate change. You would think that if it was really as easy as the deniers claim that someone, somewhere would do it”.

Indeed yes, the scientific opinion on climate change is that the Earth’s climate system is unequivocally warming, and it is extremely likely (at least 95% probability) that humans are causing most of it – that is the current reality, so I think his money is safe.

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1 thought on “The $10,000 Global Warming Skeptic Challenge”

  1. Being a physicist myself, I think this is one of the most inept statements I have seen for quite awhile. Credible skeptics like myself, who have studied the issue for more than a decade, all agree that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is occurring, and also on numerous other AGW specifics. See http://www.commdiginews.com/health-science/climate-change-where-theorists-and-skeptics-agree-and-disagree-18567/ for an excellent overview article. The real issue is how much?

    As to proving global AGW doesn’t exist, it is not for science to prove the negative. Indeed the burden of proof lies on the backs of AGW supporters to prove it does exist and is significant. I could even make an obviously false statement which cannot be disproved. For example I can state that the god of our universe lives in the engine block of a vehicle on this planet, and in fact would be willing to pay ONE MILLION DOLLARS to anyone who can scientifically prove me wrong.

    There are good solid facts on both sides of the AGW issue.

    One final thought. It is worthwhile to review some predictions, many of which were touted in the media and ultimately shown to be false. See below:

    Environmental Predictions Gone Wrong
    1865-Stanley Jevons (one of the most recognized 19th century economists) predicted that England would run out of coal by 1900, and that England’s factories would grind to a standstill.
    1891-USGS says no oil would be discovered in Kansas or Texas
    1885 U.S. Geological Survey announced there was “little or no chance” of oil being discovered in California
    1939 U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last “only another 13 years”.
    1949-Secretary of Interior announces the end of US oil was in sight.
    1952-the US President’s Materials Policy Commission concluded that by the mid-1970s copper production in the US could not exceed 800,000 tons and that lead production would be at most 300,000 tons per year.Data: But copper production in 1973 was 1.6 million tons, and by 1974 lead production had reached 614,000 tons – 100% higher than predicted. Look at it today!
    1968 Prof. Paul Ehrlich, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
    1969 Earth Day-Nigel Calder, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”
    1970-Scientific American, “humanity would totally run out of copper by 2000, and lead, zinc, tin gold and silver would all be gone by 1990.”
    1970-“…civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind,” biologist George Wald, Harvard University, April 19, 1970.
    1970-“In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” Ehrlich, speech during Earth Day, 1970
    1970-Life Magazine, “By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.”
    1970-Kenneth Watt, “If present trends continue, the world will be … eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.”
    1970 Earth Day- The Progressive, “a scenario in which four billion people would starve to death between 1980 and 1989, 65 million of whom would be Americans.”
    1972-Artic specialist Bernt Balchen, Christian Science Monitor ” a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000
    1973-Jimmy Carters Global 2000 Report , “known world supplies of zinc, gold, copper, tin, oil and natural gas will be completely exhausted in 1992.”

    1974-U.S. Geological Survey advised us that the U.S. had only a “10-year supply of natural gas”. Data: The American Gas Association said that gas supplies were sufficient for the next 1,000-2,500 years. (Julian Simon, Population Matters. New Jersey: Transaction Publications, 1990): p. 90. Note since 1990 the US has found ten of thousands of years of natural gas.
    1989-Associated Press (May 15), “Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010.”
    1989-United Nations was telling us that governments had only a 10-year window before global warming would be beyond human control. The UN was saying exactly what we’re being told today. Entire nations are at risk of being wiped off the face of the Earth as a result of global-warming-induced rising sea levels. Well, not quite exactly. You see, according to that 1989 prediction, those nations were supposed to have disappeared by the year 2000.

    1990-Michael Oppenheimer, published in “Dead Heat,” “[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots…[By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.”
    1991-Carl Sagan, ABC program Nightline on Kuwait Oil Fires, “…we know from the nuclear winter investigation that the smoke would loft into the upper atmosphere and that the net effects would be very similar to the explosion of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815, which resulted in the year 1816 being known as the Year Without a Summer, in massive agricultural failures, in very serious human suffering and, in some cases, starvation.”
    March 2000- Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, Within a few years “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Snowfall will be “a very rare and exciting event
    NOAA’s Hurricane Predictions for last 8 years
    2013 7-11 (2) Flat wrong
    2012 4-8 (10) Wrong
    2011 6-10 (7) Good
    2010 8-14 (12)
    2009 4-7 (3) wrong
    2008 6-9 (8) fair
    2007 7-10 (6) wrong
    2006 8-10 (5) FLAT WRONG
    2005 7-9 (15) FLAT WRONG
    2004 6-8 (9) wrong
    2003 6-9 (7) fair
    2002 6-8 (4) WRONG
    2001 9-12 (15) Wrong
    2000 9-13 (12)
    In 2005, the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) published a color-coded map under the headline “Fifty million climate refugees by 2010.” The primary source for the prediction was a 2005 paper by environmental scientist Norman Myers.
    Six years later, this flood of refugees is nowhere to be found, global average temperatures are about where they were when the prediction was made—and the U.N. has done a vanishing act of its own, wiping the inconvenient map from its servers.
    2008 Al Gore ‘Entire north polar ice cap will be gone in 5 years’

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