This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Global warming deniers love to point to cold or snow

as evidence against climate change, like Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe.

Remember last year when he tossed a snowball in Congress?

You know what this is? It's a snowball and that's just from outside here. So it's very, very cold out, very unseasonal. So here, Mr. President, catch this.

With that, he off-handedly disproved decades of climate science, to some people at least.

But such cold influence denial may be playing out across the U.S. in particular in

Appalachia and the South, because it turns out those areas have had lots of record low

temperatures in the last 12 years and they're also by and large the same parts of

the country that have high numbers of global warming skeptics. So researchers have a theory. that The analysis is in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Study author Robert Kaufman, an environmental scientist at Boston University,

says the way around this might be to put climate data in terms people understand, money.

We should propose a simple bet to climate skeptics, and that is, for every new record high temperature at a weather station you pay us a dollar and for

every new record low temperature we'll pay you a dollar.

Or he says think of climate change as a slot machine, especially with the

president-elect. He's run casinos so you can kind of think of climate like a

climate casino. If you were a casino owner and you had a machine that was

constantly paying out, more record high temperatures than more record low

temperatures, you would look into that

machine something's wrong with the machine and that's what the climate machine has

been doing however you want to think about it K Kaufman won't be betting. I got no dough man, I'm a, I'm an academic.

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