Let's Put Money On It

We start with a stat: The Earth hasn't had a month of below-average temperatures since February, 1985.

Since that will bring up questions from climate deniers, we have one here for them: Why is there weather?

I suspect there are millions of people in the climate denial world who can't answer that basic question. It's a pretty important — and basic — concept, especially for people in "the science isn't settled" camp.

Weather is the distribution of equatorial heat and polar cold. That's it. That's all there is to it. It's one great big balancing act.

The key word there is balance. That attempt at balance shows up as bigger swings in the jet stream.

If you made a historical animation of the jet stream over the United States, it would start out looking like a wave pattern on an oscilloscope. Over time you'd see wider fluctuations, more wobbles, a greater variance. To weather nerds, it used to be a big storm if it covered four or five states. Nowadays you can see storm fronts running from Mexico to Canada.

It's all about distributing the heat. As the planet gets warmer, the variations grow larger. Extremes become more common.

How extreme? Well, imagine seeing this in your morning forecast: Today's high will be 129.

That's shown up twice in Asian weather forecasts this year, and those are two of the highest recorded temperatures ever in human history.

To put that in perspective, I lived through the hottest day in the history of Norfolk, Va. It was 105, and I sat on a beach drinking beer under an umbrella.

That day in 2010 was the first all-time heat record I'd ever experienced, but I know that unless I get run over by a bus, it will likely not be my last. In fact, I could probably figure out a way to put money on that, too.

So here's the wager I've been making of late. It's based on something printed in the paper every day, listed on weather websites, and included in most TV newscasts.

It's the record high temperature for that day.

What I'm betting is the year in which that record was set. I'll give away almost all of recorded weather history, as far back as there are weather records, and put my faith, read put my money, on recent history.

For climate deniers, the folks who say temperatures go in cycles thanks to sunspots or whatever, well, this should be an easy bet. For people like me, who figure that as the world gets warmer, there are more new records set each year, well, that seems like an easy bet, too.

How easy? What would be the spread for a daily bet on the year in which today's record high was set?

I'll pay you a dollar for every record high not set in this century if you'll pay me $5 for every record set in 1999 or later

I set the odds at 5-1 because the actual math, based on Norfolk records, is closer to 4-1 and the idea here is to win. All told, 23.7 percent of all record high temps in Norfolk have been set in this century. To put it another way, considering the oldest record high goes back to 1874, 12 percent of the total years cover 24 percent of the total record highs.

So let's get it to dollar on dollar terms. On any given day, for me to have a 50-50 chance of taking your money, what's my cutoff year? If I'm giving you every record back to the 1870s, how far back do I have to go to reach even money? Back to World War II? Korea? Vietnam?

Try Watergate.

Think about that. Half the record high temps here have been set since 1974.

Now for a lot of people, 1974 is before they were even born, which is even more incredible when you think about it. If they've seen half the record high temps in just their lifespan, what does that say about their future? It can't be good.

I'm still crunching numbers on other cities (when searching for weather data online, search the NWS data by three-digit airport code) but in a general sense I can report the overall pattern is holding.

I heard on TV once that half of all record highs had occurred in the last 30 years, which is what got me researching this in the first place. It's a big world for such a sweeping statement, but I suspect there are places in the polar regions where this is absolutely the case.

So aside from winning a bar bet, is there a point to all this?

Two, really.

First, it's long been my contention that one reason you have all these yakkers on conservative talk radio is that there's absolutely nothing at stake. It's easy to talk about "health care freedom" when you're not actually taking away someone's all-important insurance. It's easier to proclaim the virtues of being politically incorrect than it is to actually do the tough work of getting something accomplished. So a wager makes climate change deniers put some skin in the game.

Second, there are people who don't worry about climate change because they don't expect it to affect them. It's too much of an in-the-future problem. So, seems to me that a great way to chip away at a future notion is to take their present-day money.

Back when climate change was indeed an in-the-future problem, back when the carbon-dioxide-fueled greenhouse effect was first proposed, scientists estimated it would take centuries, that's centuries plural, for it to become a problem.

That first predicition was made in 1895.

It's getting worse faster than originally feared.

Bet on it to continue.

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