Do record-setting cold temperatures mean global warming isn't happening?
Does striking out mean a baseball player isn't taking steroids?
The answers to those questions are "no" and "no," according to an educational package called "Weather on Steroids" put together by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.
The package -- which seeks to sort out how climate change is connected to extreme weather events, such as heat waves and blizzards -- includes an animated video that draws analogies between the way steroids affect baseball players and the way greenhouse gases (the steroids of the climate system) affect the weather.
"It's one of the critical questions of climate change: 'How is it going to affect, or how is it already affecting, extreme weather?'" said David Hosansky, who heads UCAR's media relations team. "There's a lot that scientists are doing to connect the dots and better understand how climate change is affecting our weather and producing some very unusual weather events.
"I think that's been a real critical thrust in climate science -- it's almost, in a way, where the rubber meets the road."
Hosansky's office fields calls on a fairly regular basis from reporters who seem to have similar questions. They want to know if their local heat wave (or tornado, hurricane, cold snap, snowstorm, flood our drought) is caused by climate change. Unfortunately, those are difficult questions to answer, and the reasons why they're difficult are now explained in a two-minute cartoon.
The video explains that it's difficult to attribute any one single home run to a baseball player's steroid use. But over a season, the number of home runs hit by a player using steroids is likely to be higher than the number of home runs hit by the same player during a season when he wasn't used steroids.
Similarly, it's difficult for a single heat wave, for example, to be attributed to an increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but over time, an atmosphere that contains more greenhouse gases likely will produce more heat waves than the atmosphere did before the increase.
And just like a baseball player who uses steroids can still strike out, record-setting cold snaps can occur even when there are additional greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The video, available at www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews, also makes the point that all humans have some naturally occurring steroids in their bodies, just as the atmosphere has some naturally occurring greenhouse gases -- but that doesn't mean the addition of either is especially healthy.
Jerry Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is managed by UCAR, narrated the video.
"I think there is a general confusion about weather versus climate and that weather is what you see out the window on any given hour and climate is the statistical collection or average of weather events," Meehl wrote in an e-mail. "It's that statistical aspect of climate that's sometimes hard to picture. That's why using steroids and baseball as an analogy seems to work for people."
And even though scientists can't fully attribute a single weather event to climate change, they are making progress in this area.
As the supplementary material that goes with the video explains, researchers are attacking the question of attribution from multiple angles. Some scientists are now analyzing the degree to which greenhouse gases may have contributed to a certain event, arguing, for example, that climate change contributed 10 percent to the magnitude of a particular heat wave.
Other researchers are trying to come up with the degree to which greenhouse gas concentrations might make any particular event more likely, arguing, for example, that the chance of a severe heat wave is increased by 10 percent because of climate change.
UCAR officials hope the video and the supplementary information in "Weather on Steroids" will be useful to a variety of people, from reporters and editors to students and teachers to the generally climate-curious.
Gifford Miller, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado, said he plans to use the video in a freshman-level class he is teaching about global change.
"It's certainly not a perfect analog, but it's not bad," he said. "I think it's a little on the simple side for a university class; it's probably better for high school."
To make the video more appropriate for his students, Miller said he plans to ask them to watch the video and then critique it, pointing out what they would add to it, if anything.
Miller said he also hopes the images of a baseball player on steroids will stick with students after the class.
"The steroid stuff has been in the news an awful lot," he said. "They did pick something that has the potential of staying with you."
Contact Camera Staff Writer Laura Snider at 303-473-1327 or firstname.lastname@example.org.