Running A Numbers Game

Sick of proponents on both sides in the climate change debate using individual weather events rather than long-term climate patterns to bolster their arguments, FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver does the blogoverse a huge favor and lays down the law on the difference between the two. He's also putting his money where his stats are.

John Hinderaker at the popular conservative blog PowerLine reports that it's been cold, cold, cold in his home town of Minneapolis, Minnesota, going to far as to compare it with "The Year Without a Summer", 1816, when global temperatures were abnormally low as a result of the eruption of Mount Tambora:

I don't think things are quite so bad this year, but if something doesn't change pretty soon 2009 may go down in history, in some parts of the U.S. at least, as another year with barely any summer. Here in Minnesota and across the Midwest, temperatures are abnormally cold. I don't know whether the phenomenon is world-wide--data that will answer this question have probably not been assembled, and may not be honestly reported--but the current low level of solar activity suggests that the cooling trend could indeed be universal.

Indeed, it's been pretty cool in Minneapolis for the past couple of days; the temperature hasn't hit 70 since midday Thursday. But has it been an unusually cool summer? No, not really. Since summer began on June 21st, high temperatures there have been above average 15 times and below average 13 times. The average high temperature there since summer began this year has been 82.4 degrees. The average historic high temperature over the same period is ... 82.4 degrees. It's been a completely typical summer in Minneapolis, although with one rather hot period in late June and one rather cool one now. (Note: actual high temperatures can be found here and historical averages can be found here.)

To paraphrase Jim Croce: "You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off the ol' Lone Ranger and you don't mess with Nate Silver's numbers."

The rules of the challenge are as follows:

1. For each day that the high temperature in your hometown is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit above average, as listed by Weather Underground, you owe me $25. For each day that it is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit below average, I owe you $25.
2. The challenge proceeds in monthly intervals, with the first month being August. At the end of each month, we'll tally up the winning and losing days and the loser writes the winner a check for the balance.
3. The challenge automatically rolls over to the next month until/unless: (i) one party informs the other by the 20th of the previous month that he would like to discontinue the challenge (that is, if you want to discontinue the challenge for September, you'd have to tell me this by August 20th), or (ii) the losing party has failed to pay the winning party in a timely fashion, in which case the challenge may be canceled at the sole discretion of the winning party.

Any takers? You can reach me by clicking the 'Contact' button at the top of the page.

EDIT: No takers yet. Eligibility will remain open through Monday (the 20th). Limit three contestants within any one 100-mile geographic radius.

And sorry for all the typos, etc. Been a long week.

Somehow, I don't think anyone's going to want to take Nate up on his challenge, even playing for $25 a day.

But I certainly hope somebody does, if only so Nate can prove his point about the number of intellectually dishonest arguments about climate change out there. Climate is long-term by definition, folks. Yearly patterns, decade-based patterns, century-based patterns. And based on those long-term patterns, things are getting warmer.

Yes, we've had ice ages before, long before man ever invented combustion engines. It's the rate of change in just a short period of time that should be worrying people. And that rate of change is increasing. If it keeps up, bad things are going to happen, weather patterns and events will become more extreme and dangerous.

It's about 71 here in Cincy at noon. Normally we should be in the upper 80's. Two years ago in July Cincy had a record number of hundred-degree days. Does this mean global warming is a hoax? No...but it does mean we are seeing more weather extremes in both directions...and that instability as the Earth loses the ability to regulate the planet's temperature due to environmental effects is the real issue. Yes, the planet is trying to compensate for us polluting the atmosphere. If you over-compensate, that's when you lose control. You get shocks to the system, short and extremely violent weather events that are well above and well below the averages...and lots more of them. It's like an unbalanced race car tire developing a wobble due to a loose lug...eventually that wobble will, over time, cause the wheel to come flying off. That's the difference between climate and weather. Weather is the individual daily wobbles in the system. Climate is the long-term results of that wobble. And the loose lugnut? Pollution. Climate numbers are showing that the weather wobbles are getting to be too much.

Putting too much pressure too quickly on any system will break it, folks.