The Market Test for Climate Change

Joe Bastardi is a long term weather forecaster for Accuweather and also a climate skeptic.  More importantly, he's the guy that commodity traders hire to give them forecasts about future weather.  In other words, when money is on the line, they don't call the IPCC, or Harvard, they call this Bastardi - who is a skeptic.

Whereas a significant portion of today’s climate scientists are politically motivated, Bastardi has only one incentive in his job: accuracy. He won’t be denied tenure or publication if he ends up on the wrong side. He gets paid handsomely — he won’t tell me just how much — for long-term weather forecasts by traders who have an interest in commodities whose production is affected by the weather. And he still gets hired, despite his rising to fame and infamy as a global-warming skeptic. His credential, in other words, is that he’s passed the market test: “Because I know the physical drivers of the atmosphere . . . people see me on TV talking about things, but that’s the tip of the iceberg — I get calls from companies when money is on the line. They want the right answer, the best answer, the quickest answer. Do you realize how much money you save if you get the weather right?”

In this article he describes precisely why he's a skeptic and offers to run a 10 year wager on weather prediction:  will the world cool 0.1 to 0.2 degrees C as he predicts or heat up substantially as the 'elite' academic scientists predicts.  It will interesting to see the result.  One thing that I do know is that in previous bets like this environmentalists have consistently gone down in flames.

I think Bastardi is very likely to repeat the trend.  The Bastard.