I keep hearing about people who do not believe that climate change is real. Quite a few people, apparently. Ordinary people. Not so ordinary people. Weather people, for crying out loud. Way more people than the accumulated evidence--consistently rising average temperatures, disappearing glaciers, disappearing arctic ice, rising ocean levels--should allow.
And, after exceptionally cold and snowy weather gripped much of the country this past winter, we saw a whole flurry--pardon the pun--of people who loudly proclaimed those big blizzards to be clear evidence that global warming is a fraud. Of course, folks do that all the time, confusing weather and climate. Apparently, that crucial difference between weather and climate is too subtle for many people to grasp.
So let me offer some help. I have an easy to understand analogy that, I think, may help some of these confused souls see the light. And it involves one of our true national treasures: baseball.
Whether you're a baseball fan or not, it should be self-evident to you that some teams are better than others. For instance, last year's eventual champions, the New York Yankees, won 103 games and lost only 59. Conversely, last year's worst team, the Washington Nationals, posted a mirror image record, winning only 59 and losing 103 games.
This is pretty typical in major league baseball. In fact, it has long been an axiom known to baseball fans that each team's season is divided into thirds: roughly speaking, every club is guaranteed to win one-third of its games, and also to lose one-third of its games. What makes the difference between a champion and an also-ran is what the teams do in the other third of their games.
Clearly, given the records cited above, the Yankees won almost every one of those "other third" games, while Washington lost just about all of them. New York was a juggernaut; the Nationals were pushovers. Hell, if these two teams ever played each other, Washington wouldn't stand a chance. The Yankees would beat their brains out.
Except, they did play each other last year. June 16-18 of 2009, the Yankees and Nationals played a three game series in the Bronx. The Yankees won the first game, 5-3. No surprise there, unless you're surprised it was that close. The surprise came the next day, when Washington won 3-2. And the jaw-dropper came the day after that, when the worst-record-in-baseball Nationals shut out the eventual World Series champion Yankees 3-0.
What happened? Did the teams trade uniforms after the first game? Were all the Yankees' best players incapacitated, or suspended, or otherwise missing for the final two games? Well, there was a long rain delay that held up that third game, but according to the box score most of the Yankees' regular players were in the lineup that day. (By the way, you can double check all of these games and stats on mlb.com.)
The plain truth is, what happened in those two games really wasn't that unusual. Washington just happened to win two games against New York. Indeed, Washington--the worst team in baseball--put together an 8 games winning streak later in the season (August 2-9). Remember that axiomatic truth about baseball: it is the game in which even the worst teams still win at least a third of their games. And that means that every so often, the worst team in baseball will beat the best team in baseball.
But--and here's the crucial point--it doesn't mean that the worst team in baseball suddenly becomes the best team in baseball. The beauty of the sport comes from the fact that it plays out over a long season; when you get to the end of that long season, when everything has had a chance to play out over time, the records really do reveal which team was the best. No surprise, then, that the Yankees did eventually shake off the shame of dropping two of three to the Nationals and wound up winning the championship. One given event, even a brief series of events, does not indicate the overall trend.
And so it is with climate change. This year's blizzards are analogous to those games the Nationals won against the Yankees--singular events that do not tell you what the broader picture looks like. Washington's two game winning streak against the Yankees did not mean they were a better team; nor do a handful of snowstorms mean the world is becoming a colder place.
It's the long-term evidence that matters: in baseball, the season records of the respective teams; for the climate, the long-range data showing warming trends that have played out over the course of decades. The day-to-day stuff makes life interesting, but it does not tell you what's really going on.
So keep the Nationals and their two wins against the Yankees in mind when you see snow outside your window and want to decide that global warming is a myth. If, in mid-June of last year, you had run out and bet on Washington to win the World Series based on what you had just seen, you would have lost your money. And if a blizzard makes you want to bet that climate change is not happening, you're just as likely to come out on the short end. The difference is, when you're wrong on climate change, all of us will lose a lot more than a $2 bet.