https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/06/bauman_climate_1.html
Arguing for YES is Bryan's uncanny track record -- he's never lost a public bet ever!
Arguing for NO is that global temperatures have gone up a lot in the 8 years since the bet was shaken on. You can look at the graph and see that Bryan Caplan was wrong.
Related market: https://manifold.markets/NcyRocks/will-bryan-caplan-lose-any-of-his-p
Close date updated to 2024-05-15 3:59 pm
Related questions
Here's a refresh of the graph a year later, through the end of 2023:
I'm frustrated by how little Bryan Caplan is Bayesian-updating on his wrongness here! I know climate change is politicized and thus an epistemic nightmare to navigate and it's really good that Bryan Caplan was willing to wager about it, but then one has to actually change one's mind!
PS: Related market: https://manifold.markets/dreev/will-carbon-removal-be-pivotal-in-m
Here's a graph of what global temperature has to do for Bryan to win the bet. Bryan bet that the 2015-2029 average temperature wouldn't exceed the green line. The red line from 2015 to 2022 is the average so far. The red line from 2022 to 2029 is what the temperature has to do to drag the overall 2015-2029 average below the green line.
Stranger things have happened! Like the time Bryan bet in 2008 (against some crazy ideologue who was convinced that the EU was about to fall apart) that no major European country would leave the EU by 2020 and then Brexit happened in 2016 and it looked like Bryan lost but THEN the universe, not wanting to spoil Bryan’s perfect betting record, somehow conspired to drag Brexit out for four years, finally becoming official 30 days after Bryan officially won the bet.
PS, lest you think Bryan won the Brexit bet on some dumb technicality, they specifically operationalized it as a major EU member officially withdrawing by 2020-Jan-01. And really it's Bryan losing that would've been the dumb technicality since what they were operationalizing was "is the EU about to collapse?".
In other words, Bryan really was proven correct in that case. But he sure as heck won't be about climate change.
