Following the controversy about hacked climate-science emails that has exploded in the last few days, our friend Robin Hanson has proposed that climate science could benefit from the clarity that prediction markets are uniquely able to bring to hotly disputed issues in science and elsewhere. Nate Silver, the polling wiz of 2008 election fame, agrees and details some of the best reasons to back environmental prediction markets.
This seems a good time, then, to revisit a presentation about “Environmental Futures” that we delivered back in September 2004 at a California Institute of Technology seminar graciously hosted by economist John Ledyard. Robin was there too, and our presentation nods gratefully to his famous paper “Could Gambling Save Science” as the spring board for our ideas about various implementation scenarios for Environmental Futures.
Five years later, is the world finally getting ready for some of these ideas to become reality? We hope you will find this presentation stimulating…
My ’92 Extropy paper gave a list of controversial claims it would be good to bet on. The first one was “By 2030, the greenhouse effect and other causes will have raised the average world sea levels by 1 meter.”