Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Convinced catastrophic global warming is an imminent reality? Want to make some fast money based on your belief? Australian bookmaker Sportsbet.com.au is willing to take your money, to place a bet on which Australian beach will be the first to “disappear” due to rising sea levels.
According to The Telegraph;
Australian bookmaker takes bets on first beaches to ‘disappear’ due to global warming
Betting agency Sportsbet.com.au says rising seas are threatening the nation’s beaches and invited bets on the first to go, with Palm Cove in Queensland at 4-1 favourite.
…
Sportsbet.com.au, an Australian betting agency, listed Palm Cove, a tropical beach in northern Queensland, as 4-1 favourite to be the first to disappear because of rising sea levels, followed by Whitehaven beach at 5-1, Darwin’s Mindil Beach at 6-1 and Noosa and Byron Bay, which have odds of $AUS7.50.
Well-known beaches in Sydney such as Palm Beach – famous for its role as Summer Bay in Home and Away – and the popular tourist destinations of Manly and Bondi were paying much longer odds of $AUS19 (£9), $21 (£10) and $21 (£10) respectively.
The agency said Nasa’s “gloomy prediction” that sea levels will rise much faster than previously thought had left Australian beaches in a perilous position.
There is no news as yet on whether Sportsbet will take bets on other alarmist favourites, such as predicting the “end of snow“, or an ice free arctic, but if enough people show an interest, I’m sure some bookmaking agency will consider adding these prophesied events to their list of available wagers.
And who knows – if you lose enough money, when sea level fails to rise as predicted, maybe you could sue NASA to get your money back.
IMPORTANT: online gambling is illegal in some jurisdictions – please ensure you are fully aware of applicable laws, before placing a bet
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I bet they never have to pay off those bets.
Unless there is a ‘none’ option in which case I clean up on it at 10,000:1 Just hope I don’t cause the bookie to commit suicide though.
I wonder what time span the statute of limitations is on gambling..?
I thought the beach was where the sea meets the land.
The sea always meets the land; no exceptions.
Therefore all beaches present and accounted for.
g
Bearing in mind geological time scales, and that a bet dies with the death of a participant , I’d say that Sportsbet are on a nice little earner.
I got odds of 80-1 on Uluru.
Another Fine Cotton Scam, Bloke down the pub. For our American friends that was an attempted Australian horse racing scam back in the 80’s. As they say in the racing game, a fool and his money are soon parted or there’s a mug born every minute.
Horse racing was a popular pastime in Fort Collins, Colorado, at the end of the 19th century but the business suffered from rumors about fixed races. In one incident the owner of the track got a word that some Denver sharpies paid off a jockey on a favorite horse. He got so angry that he pulled his revolver, jumped on a horse himself and rode the whole race behind the boy, threatening to shoot him if he tried to slow down.
The horse won.
Great deal for Sportsbet. They take the warmunist money, hold it earning interest, and never pay off because is not going to happen.
That’s right. They’ll collect your money up front and hope (and expect) that your great grandchildren will lose the betting slips or forget to collect in 80 years’ time when the beaches are still there.
Up above Kevin Lohse mentions that the bet dies with the participant. It looks like you can’t “inherit” a bet.
As a general rule, if they’re beaches, the only thing that would change the order of “when” they disappear is how tall they are. Most aren’t exactly steep, so the effective answer is “all of them.”
Wrong, the answer is none of them.
They are taking these bets because they will win the bet no matter which beach is picked. Like taking candy from a baby, or a grant from a liberal.
Obama bet the entire US economy….
Sadly you are right.
…and according to EPA head Gina McCarthy, Obama’s economy- killing edicts won’t make a dent in “Climate Change”, but is an important symbol for the rest of the world.
A phallic symbol?
a pathetic symbol more likely
Easy to do when it is not your money, and no one will hold you accountable for making the wrong wager.
Australians will bet on anything even 2 flys running up the wall
Yeah but that race is an even money bet. We Aussies like a bit of ‘value’ when we’re punting.
So 10 cane toads hopping out of a circle on the ground is a much more attractive proposition.
(Have to watch out for unscrupulous owners putting their toads in the freezer until 5 minutes before the race though, so they run ‘dead’. The best way to check for this is to kiss all the toads before they line up on the starting line – the ones with cold lips are not good to bet on. You can usually con a greenie into doing this test for you though – just tell ’em it’s checking for effects of global warming on cane toad hopping ability. There’s bound to be research grant in that somewhere as well.)
Aren’t those things poisonous?
The cane toads or the greenies?
All of the above!
It’s a pretty safe bet. “Bets void if none disappear by 2018”
http://www.sportsbet.com.au/betting/current-affairs/global-warming-specials
Hilarious – missed that 🙂
Three years free interest. Then return the money. These guys are running a better scam than yhe US income tax withholding. Folks glad to get a refund, never realizing they stupidly loaned the Feds their hard earned refund money in return for nothing.
I wonder if they allow blokes to re-up for another 3 years of beach wagering come ’18?
Aww! They don’t have a “None-Of-The-Above”. I’d put a few grand on that.
I probably ought to remind betters that the current rate of sea level rise in Sydney, basically unchanged rate in 125 years, is 0.65mm/year Fremantle (Western Australia) has a rate of 1.58mm/year.
Now seeing as beaches are build from moving sand, surf beaches lose sand and gain sand depending of sea conditions, but they do not disappear from rising sea levels, any more than coral atolls do.
Rising sea levels just make the average sand level higher.
Season to season changes will be far greater than any measureable change.
Who gets to decide the definition of when the beach has ” disappeared ” ??? Many beaches temporarily ” disappear ” during hurricanes, tsunami’s etc !!!!
Quite a few of the beaches around Perth “disappear” every winter. Winter storms scrape them down to the reef. Sand sweeps up from the south and replaces all of it in the Spring. Summer calms dump more and more sand up on to the beach from the offshore reefs. The cycle repeats.
No beach is the same day to day that I’ve seen. Course that depends on how you define a beach. Saw one in England composed entirely of rounded cobble. Big ones at that. A perfect semicircle of pristine rock. Made a hell of a noise when the waves came crashing in. Be suicide to swim there then.
There’s a beach at the tip of the Baja called Punta Colorado. Composed entirely of shell. I suppose it’ll be there till the Mexicans find a way to screw it up. A few gringo condos ought to do it.
I was thinking the same thing. I know there is a beach south of Perth that has almost disappeared because of erosion, not global warming, but will it count?
Mind you, we do have “king tides” occasionally.. so maybe a flat estuarine beach could “go under water” for a few hours if we get one of those.
I think I actually recall it happening occasionally in the past.. but don’t have time to research.
Here you go..
http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/201401/r1230671_16221832.jpg
http://resources0.news.com.au/images/2015/03/19/1227269/680364-63c732ee-cdf0-11e4-b9ca-5d6718665910.jpg
First picture is a king tide at Palm Cove,
Second is Cyclone Nathan at Palm Cove.
Too true Andy, Only needed to head down to Kingscliffe in Northern New South Wales in 2012 and watch the beach ‘disappear’ due to massive king tides this one day.
Craig, I think that Kingscliffe beach was also mined for ilmenite, rutile, and zircon. Perhaps they forgot to put the sand back after extracting the heavies.
If a warmist makes the bet wouldn’t that be known as “putting your money where your mouth is?”
Not really. They’ll just be getting their money back in 2018.
We used to raise good money on betting when ice out happened on lakes in Vermont, but now that we no longer know what ice is …
+10. The bigger long term Vermont worry is not knowing what water is in summer, when the next glaciation returns.
+1
All climate alarmists should take that bet, it is a sure winner. Or is it different when it is your own money that’s at stake?
I am not familiar with betting and i need some definition of when it is gone, but great fun.
Wonder how many peoble at BOM that would take the bet.
Bookie always wins – this is a great opportunity for Sportsbet. Got to admire their strategy here, no wining bets in anyone’s lifetime! What is the small print, how long does the beach need to be submerged?? Do the winners need to wait forever to make sure it is not a temporary flood, before claiming their winnings??
Again, they refund in 2018 after nobody wins. The book just gets to hold all the money and earn interest until then. Plus keep the wagers from anyone who doesn’t claim a refund from their voided ticket.
What’s the point in a voided bet? I didn’t think bookies worked like that. So that makes this some kind of spoof?
And get tons of free publicity from the idiot editors who run the story in their ‘climate alarmism’ department. This is fantastic PR and SEO strategy for sports bet.
https://emsnews.wordpress.com/2015/09/07/new-hysteria-about-frogs-in-washington-state-they-will-die-due-to-hot-weather/
I dug up a picture showing the size of prehistoric amphibians from the days when they ruled the very warm earth millions of years ago and one of these critters were bigger than crocodiles!
This hysteria about warmth being evil for frogs is most irritating. 100% of the frogs being studied came to these places in Washington after the present Interglacial made it warm enough for them. NO frogs in 90% of Canada and the Northeast/Great Lakes US survived the last Ice Age. None. All are recent (in geological time scales) interlopers who moved north as the great ice sheets melted.
I wonder how many would go for such a bet? I should imagine very few in reality as many of the “true believers” aren’t true at all. There’s plenty of arm-waving and lots of noise in support of their Cause, but very little cash on the table.
Watch now – there’ll either be astonishing silence from those “true believers” as they look the other way and “do not see” the opportunity, or we’ll hear excuse after excuse for why they each personally will not put their money where their mouths are.
Of course they could lie about their bets (SHOCKER!) but they’ll just look like fools come 2018 when the beaches are still right there for all to enjoy and 2018 is too close for comfort.
This should be a nice little earner for SportsBet.
But in a dramatic breakthrough the ABC today broadcast a report about research that indicates that CO2 acidification of the sea does not cause bleaching of corals.
what???
was that on a 3am news break?
seeing as they admit now that 40% reef coral damage is due to Crown Of thorns..which has been eating the reef since? late 70s..
there’ll be a few peeved warmists having kittens:-)
Sixty years ago I often used to go to Hallets Cove. Not long ago I saw a recent photo of the place. Looked just as I remember it.
The Palm Cove beach is only about 20ft wide.That is not a beach.
It is just an alarmist propaganda – if bet is voided, it is a spoof.
Where I live, the “beach” was about 60 metres landward from my house a few hundred/thousand years ago.
The house is built on a former frontal dune that disappeared, and there are now two to three disappeared beaches in front of that. Looks like the current beach is on track for disappearing for the same reason, as sand and mangroves are slowly accumulating. Not sea level rise, so not eligible for sportsbet. Do tsunamis count I wonder? Mission Beach more likely to be swamped that Palm Cove if Noggin Rock lets go, but its not on the list.
The smart betting money would be on investing in SportsBet.
Well, there is some merit in this.
Global warming scientists should be forced to bet their career by forecasting against real scientists.(loser gets defunded).