Al Gore: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is!

posted at 12:50 pm on August 29, 2009 by Howard Portnoy
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It is no secret that Al Gore has amassed a fortune bemoaning the fate of the planet. Lawrence Solomon writes in the Financial Post that Gore, once ridiculed “in investment circles for his lack of financial sophistication,” is now on the verge of becoming the planet’s first “climate billionaire.”

Whether his concerns are valid or not, you can’t fault Gore really for creating an industry around  global warming alarmism. It’s the American system of free enterprise at work, after all. Build a better mouse trap, and they will come — or something like that.

What you can do if you’re cynical about Gore’s dire predictions — and what one man has done — is challenge Al to put up or shut up. J. Scott Armstrong, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, has bet Gore $20,000 that he will be able to make more accurate forecasts of annual mean temperatures than those that can be produced by the climate models Gore and his followers base their predictions on.

Armstrong, as reported by Vladimir at RedState.com, is co-author of a paper presented in June to the International Symposium on Forecasting, the conclusion of which was as follows: The “no-change” model, which Armstrong subscribes to, is accurate for making policy decisions about climate change, while the “CO2 model” that Gore and “his scientific consensus” insist on using is not. (Sidebar: Real scientists never use the word consensus or refer to a hypothesis as “settled” or “beyond debate.”)

So far, Gore has declined to take the bet, citing several different reasons. One of the funnier reasons recently put forth by a Gore spokesman is that “Mr. Gore does not make financial bets.”

Even though Gore has chickened out so far, the financial markets haven’t. This means that you can get in on the action, if you are so inclined. Online wagering sites, such as Intrade, are already accepting bets. Here is the current “line”:

As you can see, a bet that Armstrong is right returns $100 on a bet of $62. Betting that Gore is right, meanwhile, returns the same C-note for a far more modest investment of $38. Anybody who is as certain as Gore claims to be about the fate of our planet would be a fool not to take the odds.

Armstrong has already stipulated that the funds would be placed in a Charitable Trust established at a brokerage house, with the winner being named at the annual International Symposium on Forecasting in 2018. This of course remains purely academic unless Gore changes his mind. But I wouldn’t bet on that happening.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

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