Gore Won't Put His Money Where His Mouth Is

Justin Paulette

Justin Paulette is an attorney practicing international law in bella Italia. He hails from the great Buckeye State, "The Heart of it All," the only state with a bridge which you can cross and still be on the same side of the river, home of the hot dog, pop top soda can and the largest basket in the world! Though he's spent the past decade jet-setting across the Atlantic with one foot in London and the other on Capitol Hill, he still fancies himself a Mid-western, God-fearing, role-playing geek at heart.

Posted:

03/27/08

Former US Vice President Al Gore makes a keynote speech at a press conference, addressing the major climate change challenges that threaten economic sustainability. Today is the deadline of the Global Warming Challenge - a bet proposed by J. Scott Armstrong, a climate-change skeptic who doubts the varsity of climate forecasting models upon which Al Gore had based many of his dooms-day predictions.

The challenge dictates that Armstrong and Gore each put $10,000 into a Charitable Trust Fund. Armstrong then proposes to forecast temperature change more accurately than any climate model Gore chooses over a 10-year period. Armstrong forecasts that global mean temperature will not change.

Gore insisted that he was too busy to enter into the bet by the original deadline, so Armstrong extended until today. Gore has failed to accept.

Of course, this entire ordeal is a political stunt. The cash involved is minuscule and the bet requires an excessive duration. However, it does illuminate a single point: Gore is willing to wager taxpayer money on his wild, the-sky-is-falling hypothesis, but he feels that personal risks are beneath his merit. I commend Mr. Gore for refusing to wager his wealth on such a bet, and hope that voters do likewise whenever the issue is brought before them on a ballot.