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Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

Let's flip this:

1. I will award $10,000 of my own money to anyone that can demonstrate, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change IS 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.

Obviously not hard to see how a global warming denier could get away with not paying anybody.

Does anybody seriously believe that would prove anything either?

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OK, challenge accepted. :-) I am submitting this: http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence

Please provide the comments why the evidence failed to prove the point.

Correlation != Causation.* Maybe climate patterns are on a 650,001 year cycle?

* I make no claims as to my stance on the issue. I am simply playing devil's advocate.

Ah well, I guess you can play it that way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHXTa-946Bw

Still, it was worth of potential $10000. :-)

Anyway, I actually had a larger point. If the person giving the challenge is serious about this, they may easily prove it by giving back more helpful/reasonable comments.

I had a similar thought. But I take the point more seriously.

To be clear, given the current data it's very likely that the climate is warming.

But there are no empirical data that show we can do anything about it.

A better contest in response to this post would be awarding $10,000 for proof that any plan (cap-and-trade bill X, global carbon tax of Y%) would be a net benefit over a given period of time (50 years, a century?).

This contest wouldn't prove anything either, but it does demonstrate something more profound about the limits of empirical decision making.

Exactly. This is pointless.

except its a good "publicity" strategy in right direction but agreed the method is little more than a moot point.

I don't get why people make a distinction between man-made climate change, and "natural" climate change, when both have equally terrible results. Even if the earth is "natually" warming, it's still going to cause issues. Why not work to stop it?

Imagine you are someone who believes that we don't understand the climate well enough to determine if releasing ridiculous amounts of CO2 has any effect whatsoever. If you believed that, you probably wouldn't think that we understood the climate well enough to alter it.

My issue is that I've heard many pro global warming scientists on public radio say that even if man-made global warming doesn't exit, we should have all of these regulations and tax increases because it's good for the environment.

The issue has always been increased state control.

So what exactly do you have to lose if you leave the oil/coal in the ground? It will still be there for your descendants.

Especially, if you accept that global warming exists but is not man-made, it may be useful to keep backup of energy to be able to deal with it in the future, wouldn't it?

Easy for rich Westerners to say. We're not the ones who will have to go back to subsistence farming.

Our descendants will be vastly richer and smarter and better informed than we are, so you're saying we should tax the poor to help the rich.

Making energy more expensive now reduces economic progress, which is exactly the thing we need to outgrow this and all other future potential threats.

Yeah. Or our descendants will be doomed. We have no idea.

This could be a good argument if the actual profits from coal and oil were really going to development of sustainable technologies (or poor people, in case of argument from streptomycin). In fact, that's precisely what the carbon tax proposals try to induce.

But I am not convinced; oil and coal companies fight this tooth and nail.

Profits are irrelevant. What matters are the benefits, which include the consumer surplus as well as the producer surplus. So long as coal and oil are the cheapest most reliable source of energy, using them makes the economy more efficient than not using them and an efficient, functioning economy buys us more safety margin for just about any conceivable future threats, not just climate-related ones. Whereas a crippled economy where we use less energy automatically makes us more vulnerable to many other conceivable future threats, even ones we didn't explicitly prepare for. (Getting hit by an asteroid, disease epidemics, global cooling...)

Switching to less CO2-intensive technologies will happen anyway regardless but if you want to push it along, how about removing some of the roadblocks to nuclear power? (Including recycling/reprocessing waste into more fuel, which has been illegal in the US since the 1970s)

Well, IIRC, the issue is that with science, nothing can be definitely be "proven." What makes it something in the scientific realm is that it is potentially disprovable. No?

So while we can show correlation and come up with hypotheses and theories etc ad nauseum, as I understand it, you can't "prove" anything. Supposedly. You can just show that your current theory is better than what we had before, basically.

So the "$10k to disprove" works scientifically. The "$10k to prove" should not.

Or so I understand it.

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