Putting money where your mouth is in global warming debate

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Climate change sceptics bet $10,000 on cooler world:

"The Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev have agreed the wager with a British climate expert, James Annan."

Since these two Russians work at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in Irkutsk (probably the coldest city of its size in the world) you can hardly accuse them of betting on the side that would make them comfortable. The grounds of their confidence is that the sun is expected to enter a less active sunspot phase for several decades and their data show that earth temperature is more sensitive to solar activity than human actions such as the burning of fossil fuels.

Although I side with the Russians on this one, Dr. Annan, on the staff of the Japanese Earth Simulator supercomputer project in Yokohama, deserves credit for offering to make wagers to demonstrate his confidence in his work. This article says he would like to see a formal futures market in climate which would allow those with an economic stake in future climate conditions to hedge their risk. This sounds like a very interesting idea.