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A local weatherman posted a bar graph showing how much hotter the Gulf of Mexico America was than the average.
The graph covers from 1878 to present and compares the measured temperatures to an average from 1961-2010.
Average? Do the mean the mean? Mode? Median? They don't say.
But I happen to know something about math and a bit about statistics.
This is cherry picking.
The average they used is arbitrary and suspect that it's not near so bad if you calculated the mean temp from 1878 to present.
But why stop at 1878?
I happen to know a bit about The Old West too. We had some record cold going on in the 19th century. Like the year without a summer, 1816? Four of the worst seven years for cold are in the 1800's and another is 1978 which is used in their determination for their mean.
You don't think they would have picked an average that's cooler than normal and then picked a start point that's also colder than average to make the current temperatures seem abnormally high, would they?
I got accused of having Dunning Krueger.
But Thag know this math.
You might like "How To Lie With Statistics" by Darrell Huff. I used to assign it for my students reading list. Or you may be beyond him already. Good take down!
ReplyDeleteI'm not good at math, but I know when stuff doesn't Add Up. The world has been nothing But change since the beginning. Centuries of brutal landscapes of ice across the northern Americas, the badlands show the result of a big,fast,melt off. Check out Carolina Bays. Thought to be the result of massive chunks of ice from a meteor strike of the mile thick glacier . Randal Carlson has a lot of videos about it.
ReplyDelete1878 seems like a strange date to start with a data set. The only thing I get from that is the average water temperature in the Gulf is not constant. No shit Banacek!
ReplyDeleteWhy 1878? Because there was a 2 week blizzard in the middle of summer that affected temperatures all the way down to the Gulf. Especially hard hit were the Dakotas and Oklahoma areas.
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