Tossing Coins, Playing Poker, and Global Warming

News Item:   "June 2011 was the 316^th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20^th century average. The last month with below-average temperature was February 1985." 

 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's monthly climate report.  See (NOAA)

Now if the planet weren't warming, every month would have a 50/50 chance of being warmer or cooler than average, just like flipping a coin for heads or tails, say heads for warmer and tails for cooler.  Now what are the chances of having 316 straight heads?  That would be 0.5 to the 316th power--it's a number so small that my calculator just gave me an error message trying to read it.  Anyone want to bet that next month will be cooler than average?

More news:  Here are the earth's warmest 10 years since records began being kept in 1880:

Rank             Year                Degrees F above 20th Century average

1                   2005                1.12

                     2010                1.12

3                   1998                1.08

4                   2003                1.04

                     2002                1.04

6                   2006                1.01

                     2009                1.01

8                   2007                 .99

9                   2004                 .97

10                 2001                 .94

Now you may notice that 9 of the hottest 10 years are all in the last 10 years! (and 1998 isn't far behind).

Just in case you like to play poker, that would be like drawing four aces in two consecutive hands.  Wouldn't any poker player know that the cards were fixed if they were dealt just one hand with four aces, let alone two in a row?  

Just for fun--what are the odds of that?  Well, thanks to Mr. Google I learned that the odds of drawing 4 aces in one hand of five cards is 1 in 54,145.  So the odds of doing that twice in a row would be to multiply that number by itself.  That gives about 1 in 3 billion.  (To get technical--the odds would even be less than that since we are talking about not just 8 aces, but 9 out of 10.   On the other hand, if there were really 130 years of data the odds of being in the top 10 would be the same as drawing an ace--i.e. 1/13; however some places--e.g. China--didn't start reporting data until 1951, so the odds of being in the top 10 are a bit higher than drawing an ace.)

Also note, these numbers are global (after all we are talking about global warming).  For just the U.S., 1998 is still the hottest year, and even 1921 makes it into the top ten.