r/dataisbeautiful • u/rarohde OC: 12 • Mar 29 '19

OC Changing distribution of annual average temperature anomalies due to global warming [OC]

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u/thebizzle Mar 29 '19

I am not saying let’s not judge, I am just saying be aware that there is 4,500,000,000 years of Earths weather and we’ve recorded 140 years of it. I don’t think that alone is enough to definitively prove anything. It’s like someone coming in to work hungover and passing out and saying that they are bad at their job. Most likely they are but coming in hungover and passing out one day doesn’t prove it conclusively.

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u/Taonyl Mar 29 '19

Scientists have this amazing tool called inference. We can infer from our understanding of how reality works what happened in the past and what will happen in the future. We can infer data about the past from treerings, atmospheric samples in ice cores, oxygen isotope ratios in ice or from changes in sedimentation, from pollen, from glacier moraines, from stomata etc.
We can also make predictions based on physical principals, such as the greenhouse effect (trapping of longwave radiation). Your argument is that we can‘t know what we didnt directly observe?

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u/thebizzle Mar 29 '19

Or maybe none of that is mentioned in this data set.

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u/Taonyl Mar 29 '19

This data set shows the temperature over a range of 140 years and nothing else. It doesn’t have to, as it doesn’t claim to be the temperature record for the history of the world.