Les Jones

Environment > Climate Change Wager

From The Gruniad via Jim Miller.

Two climate change sceptics, who believe the dangers of global warming are overstated, have put their money where their mouth is and bet $10,000 that the planet will cool over the next decade.

The Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev have agreed the wager with a British climate expert, James Annan.

The pair, based in Irkutsk, at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics, believe that global temperatures are driven more by changes in the sun's activity than by the emission of greenhouse gases. They say the Earth warms and cools in response to changes in the number and size of sunspots. Most mainstream scientists dismiss the idea, but as the sun is expected to enter a less active phase over the next few decades the Russian duo are confident they will see a drop in global temperatures.

I'm still betting - based mostly on guesswork, and also on a certain amount of hope - that solar activity will be found to be the cause of the global warming that was seen in the last century. If global warming really is caused by greenhouse gases, and if the net effect is negative, we're going to be in trouble unless we have an awfully big advance in energy production technology.