Slashdot Mirror
Australia's Hottest Summer Beats Previous Record by 'Large Margin' (brisbanetimes.com.au)
As Australia welcomes the first day of autumn with a sigh of relief, the summer statistics have arrived from the Bureau of Meteorology confirming suspicions that the country just sweated through it's hottest-ever summer. From a report: The national mean temperature for summer smashed the 1961-1990 average by a whopping 2.14C, almost a full degree above the previous hottest summer on record (2012-2013), which was 1.28 degrees above the old average. The mean maximum temperature also beat the 2012-2013 mean maximum by a similar margin (2.61 degrees above average compared to 1.64 degrees above). "It was exceptionally warm across most of the country," the weather bureau's summary states, with NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and the Northern Territory all recording their hottest-ever summer as severe and lengthy heatwaves spread across much of the country in December and January.
Whenever you ear a report of a hot or cold spell, I recommend visiting University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer site to look at the temperature anomaly maps. This gives you a far better picture of what's going on globally than local reports do.
For example in this winter's bitter cold spell in North America, you would have seen extremely high temperatures in places like Svalbard Norway. This shows that the cold temperatures in the US midwest weren't the *globe* being colder, they were in fact the consequence of the incursion warm air from the temperate latitudes into the Arctic. Since temperatures mix very slowly on a global scale, the cold Arctic air was displaced southward into central North America. When those cold temperatures "disappeared" a few days later, to be replaced with record warm temperatures, they actually just moved to a different place (e.g. the North Atlantic).
Of course this is still weather, but it's weather compared to a long term climate *baseline* -- 1979-2000. If you make a habit of visiting this data site you'll get used to seeing the globe mostly *orange*, meaning hot compared to the baseline. Eight of the past ten years are among the ten hottest years in the instrumental record. Nine of the last ten were among the hottest when they happened. To see an extensively *blue* (cool) map, you'll have to wait for the next major La Nina event, although in all probability that will still be hotter than baseline most of the time.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This is the problem with the arguments of a lot of global warming alarmists. They've crafted their arguments so that warmer temperatures are evidence of global warming, and cooler temperatures are also evidence of global warming. To be scientifically valid, a theory has to be falsifiable. If you concoct your argument so that no matter what happens it supports your theory, then it is not falsifiable, and either your theory or your argument is flawed. (This is the problem with string theory - nobody has presented a way to disprove it. So it remains forever stuck in the realm of maybe true but who really knows.)
Well the problem is that climate change evidence appears in the form of both rising global means and increasing global variance of temperature. The problem with this from a PR perspective is that variance (or standard deviation) is a complex statistical concept. How you do communicate that to the public? You can't so they simply point at extreme weather events as evidence (they are). And since that includes both warm and cold events and there are stupid people on both sides, you get dumb absolutist arguments. You sounds scientifically literate pointing out falsifiablity but your simplistic reduction to a binary situation allows you to both be completely wrong and sound scientifically accurate at the same time. You are wrong because we can measure variance and it is increasing which gives us even more evidence that climate change is happening. But you are right that the public wouldn't understand that more subtle point and would be unable to see the fallacy in the binary reduction you used. Either you understand PR well, or you are the victim of PR...
PS The term variance is abused in other fields like data science to mean even more vague but complex things (like error rate or uncertainty).
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
A YouTuber I follow is at the Avalon Airshow, just south of Melbourne. Not only is it pushing 40, it's windy, that hair-dryer hot wind that makes 40-ish temperatures even worse. In the meantime we've just had the coldest February ever here in Vancouver.
...laura