Bookies don’t buy media hype. They don’t get government grants to sweeten the odds for certain outcomes. Their livelihoods depend on the cold, rational assessment of probabilities.

[Compare the predictive value of various U.S.-election betting lines with the predictive value of exit-polling, for instance: Cash doesn’t lie.]

So here’s a story from Down Under (from tomorrow’s Australian actually) about some interesting betting trends Across the Pond:

Scientists out in the cold as bookie baulks at forecasts
The Independent unearths meteorologists who are confident 2009 will be one of the hottest years on record in Britain
As Britain endured some of its coldest weather for years, forecasters warned that the next 12 months could bring blistering heat.
Snow blanketed large parts of the country, causing travel chaos. While the icy weather is predicted to last until the weekend, scientists at the Meteorological Office in London and the University of East Anglia said this year’s average global temperature would be more than 0.4C above the long-term average, which would make 2009 one of the five hottest years on record.
Temperatures were set to drop overnight to between -4C and -7C. “It is a few years since it has been as cold as this,” said Dan Adamson, a forecaster at MeteoGroup.
Temperatures have dropped in the past week to -13C in the Scottish Highlands and -9C in Oxfordshire. Heavy snow fell in northern England yesterday, with lighter falls across Kent, Sussex, London and East Anglia.
At Banham Zoo in Norfolk, keepers were trying to encourage a pair of Siberian tiger cubs to leave their covered pen. The animals can survive in temperatures as low as -40C but the 11-week-old cubs have baulked at -4C.
Bookmaker William Hill has cut the odds for a record cold temperature in 2009 from 20-1 to 16-1 and halved the odds of skating taking place on the Serpentine (a lake in central London) to 8-1.