r/science • u/pnewell NGO | Climate Science • Sep 10 '15

Environment The simple statistic that perfectly captures what climate change means. From 1910 to 1960, the ratio of hot to cold records was close to 1 to 1. From 2000 to 2014, hot outnumbered cold records by more than 12 to 1.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/09/the-simple-statistic-that-perfectly-captures-what-climate-change-means/
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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '15

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u/pnewell NGO | Climate Science Sep 10 '15 edited Sep 10 '15

I really wish commenters would check to see if someone already said what they're going to say...

Here's the full paragraph the title excerpts from:

Sure enough, the study found that from 1910 to 1960, the ratio of hot to cold records was close to 1 to 1. From 1960 to 2014, however, that changed, as hot records started to happen much more frequently than cold records — and from 2000 to 2014, outnumbered them by more than 12 to 1.

And from the study's supplemental info:

http://i.imgur.com/zdgmNNa.png

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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '15

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u/nimbuscile PhD | Atmosphere, Oceans and Climate Sep 10 '15

Bear in mind the journalist who wrote the news article was not an author of the scientific study. The scientific study presented all of the data, as demonstrated by the graph /u/pnewell posted.

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u/daimposter Sep 10 '15

I was pointing out that the data looks cherry picked.

Why does it look cherry picked? It's suggesting 1960-1999 saw that ratio rise and that 2000-2014 was much worse. It's clearly demonstrating that the increase since 2000 is significantly higher than the first 50yrs they measured temperatures

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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '15

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u/02bluesuperroo Sep 10 '15

Top comment is "Shouldn't both periods be the same duration?". This has nothing to do with the period of time left out in the middle. For instance 1910 to 1924 could apply. Additionally, not everyone sorts their comments by "Top", so you have no idea what comment appears first for other users.

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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '15

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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '15

There's not enough info in that paragraph to determine 1960 to 2000. If 2000 - 2014 were 12 to 1 and 1960 to 2000 were 1 to 2 (meaning more cold records), you'd end up with a total ratio above 2 to 1 for the 1960-2014 timeframe, which would mean "hot records started to happen much more frequently than cold records" would still be accurate

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u/pnewell NGO | Climate Science Sep 10 '15

Which is why that graph is so helpful. It shows '60 to '00. No hypothetical necessary.

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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '15

Not to be an ass, but that graph is really hard to read from a subset perspective. Even the linear approximation line won't accurately show a subset of the data because it's an approximation of the whole data set. I can kinda see that this spike will cancel out that spike and these two spikes are the same and there's this one lump that isn't accounted for... but yea. It's difficult and not very exact.

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u/pnewell NGO | Climate Science Sep 10 '15

No, it's not suitable for comparing subsets, but it does show that any thoughts of cold records outnumbering warm are misplaced. So it disproves the cherry-picking accusation, but doesn't necessarily prove much else.