Almost ten years ago, Pierre Gosselin and the deniers at NoTricksZone blog made a bet with some of their “alarmist” counterparts at Skeptical Science: would 2011-2020 be warmer or cooler than 2000-2011?
A couple dozen deniers pooled just over $5,000, while 11 people who were pretty sure basic physics would continue to play out put up a combined $14,080, with the proceeds going to charity.
Well, apparently Gosselin has seen enough, and recently posted the results. Spoiler alert: He lost! As did the rest of humanity and the planet, as yes, the most recent decade has been hotter than the one before. But with a… to put it mildly, we’ll say “conspiracy-prone” mindset, it’s not like Gosselin is taking this as a sign that he was wrong about climate change.
Having placed a bet that fossil fuels are not causing warming, and then accepted that warming has occurred, Gosselin still can’t cross the bridge over denial. “In fact”, he writes,” the results only reinforce my view because it’s crystal clear that the 2016-2020 warming was due to the EL Niño, a natural factor, and not CO2.”
People not in denial, as one of the bet winners, Dana Nuccitelli commented, might “find it amusing that [Gosselin] think[s] one El Niño event 4 years ago is sufficient to have caused the 0.52°C lower troposphere warming over the past decade estimated by the satellites.” Or more plainly, per Nuccitelli: “That is one fuckin’ helluva El Niño.”
To drive the point home, Nuccitelli notes that “the current temperature is right where it was at the peak of that monster El Niño. Kind of makes you wonder what physical effect could be causing so much warming now, given that the El Niño ended 4 1/2 years ago.”
Instead of recognizing that he’s lost because increasing fossil fuel emissions are warming the climate, as a skeptic might, Gosselin instead doubles down on denial — literally.
Because Nuccitelli also offered to re-up the bet for this next decade, Gosselin made a whole new post to accept the bet and put down $100 that “the 2021-2030 decade will be same [sic] or cooler than the 2011-2020 decade.”
If Nuccitelli is “right again,” Gosselin writes, “then I might have to concede man is causing a significant part of the surface warming — depending on what the data suggest and the conclusions reached by objective scientists.”
Of course! We should all just wait another decade. Then surely Gosselin will be convinced and, along with him all the other deniers with totally-good-faith-and-definitely-not-fossil-fuel-funded objections to limiting fossil fuel use will also be enlightened and see the error of their ways.
That, or Gosselin will once again find some weird and laughable excuse to claim that even though the atmospheric warming trend has continued, it’s not because of the pollution we know warms the atmosphere. He and others will move the goalposts, reset expectations for attribution studies and other science higher and higher to ever-more-impossible levels of precision and certainty, and claim that maybe in another ten years they’ll be more open to persuasion about the need for climate action.
Gosselin’s $100 bet on temps by 2030 is pretty low stakes. If he really wanted to put his money where his mouth is, Gosselin would move to Cancer Alley in Louisiana where he can enjoy both the pollution and the extreme weather wrought by the fossil fuels he claims are harmless.