WEATHER IS TO CLIMATE, WHAT THE NCAA TOURNAMENT IS TO COLLEGE BASKETBALL

A freak snowstorm in June or a heatwave in the Artic? That’s weather - unpredictable and hard to forecast.

A desperation heave that lifts some no-name school from the Midwest over a basketball Blue Blood or an unknown 20-something coach out dueling a legend like Jim Boeheim of Syracuse? That’s the NCAA Tournament – unpredictable and impossible to forecast.

However, an obvious trend line that 97% of all scientists agree shows the planet warming? That’s climate and it is predictable and easy to forecast.

Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, Michigan State, Arizona, UCLA all making the tournament year after year after year? That’s college basketball and it too is predictable and easy to forecast.

As the nation is about to dive headfirst into March Madness in basketball and Spring Madness that is the weather, I thought it might be a good idea to compare and contrast these two happenings within their unique relationship to larger forces, i.e. college basketball and climate.

Trying to accurately guess what is going to happen in the Tournament is folly. No one, not Joe at the bar nor the paid experts at CBS and ESPN know what’s going to happen. In fact, Joe at the bar has just as much chance of filling out an accurate bracket as Jay Bilas or Jim Nance or anyone else who makes his living handicapping college hoops. The reason is simple: a massively compressed tournament with 68 teams made up of teenagers and 20-year-olds fighting their guts out for eight days is the very definition of unpredictability. Wild and crazy things don’t just happen – they have to happen in this kind of frenzied chaos.

However, out of this chaos will come a champion that is almost 100 percent guaranteed to be one of the perennial powers in college basketball. The Dukes, the Kansas’s, the Kentucky’s the UCLA’s, the Michigan State’s, the Connecticut’s continuously win and continuously challenge for a national championship because the almost always pair the best players in the nation with the best coaches in the game. That is predictable and that is college basketball. Talent and resources win.

Like the tournament, weather is crazy and unpredictable. It’s a mere snapshot of the larger climate and there are way too many variables to contend with in order to always obtain accurate forecasts.  The meteorologist isn’t often wrong because he or she is stupid. He or she is often wrong because in most cases they are trying to predict the unpredictable.

But climate scientists aren’t playing the same game as meteorologists. Climate science is all about study that takes the long view. Patterns and averages calculated over decades and millennia and carefully categorized and tabulated. Massive data, massive time and massive patience are the hallmarks of climate science and its output is thoroughly predictable models.

You can’t confuse weather with climate. They are very, very different. One is a frustrating line graph of wildly swinging axis marks, the other is a steady chart of progression. One samples hours and days, the other samples centuries and eras.

Similarly, we have the wacky going’s on of March Madness, where a “Cinderella Story” underdog school will capture America’s heart for a couple of days. The crazy 5-12 seeded upsets, the tiny school sleighing a goliath.  But that craziness for eight days ends – and it ends predictably with a big time school stacked with NBA talent cutting down the nets in the Championship.

So when, for example, a politician like Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma famously tosses a snowball onto the senate floor on a chilly February to “prove” global warming is a hoax, he’s conflating weather with climate. It would be just as inaccurate if a sports prognosticator were to claim that tiny George Mason’s run to the Final Four in 2006 “proved” that little no-name schools were now dominating college basketball.

They call it March Madness because of its very nature of unpredictability. However, when the dust settles, the smart money will always be on one of the traditional basketball power schools to win it all. Similarly, weather forecasts rely heavily on educated guesses because of its very nature of unpredictability. However, the smart money –and indeed the very fortunes of our planet – rests with the predictable and hard truths of climate science.