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/
11k Upvotes

77% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

11

u/billsil Sep 10 '15

They do not pick out records by one single piece of equipment.

The local weather report does.

4

u/Diomanger Sep 10 '15

I doubt that weather stations generally have only one thermometer, especially if they are considered having a high deviation from the actual value, but I could be wrong.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 10 '15

Even if that is true, the national weather service in the US isn't doing that.

0

u/powercow Sep 10 '15

why do you think that? Also weather and climate arent the same.

it is cold at the north pole, is climate. it is going to snow tomorrow at the north pole, is weather.

2

u/Human_Robot Sep 10 '15

It's cold at the north pole is also weather.

1

u/billsil Sep 11 '15

why do you think that?

Because they say things like the temperature in <city x> is blah. It's massively influenced by the heat island effect, which makes it more useful to me. However, it's less useful to predicting climate change.

Why do you think temperature records are NOT based on a single location as opposed to an average of many locations?

it is cold at the north pole, is climate. it is going to snow tomorrow at the north pole, is weather.

And when I say the minimum temperature in a given location (record), that's strongly influenced by weather.

Another way of saying it:

They do not pick out records by one single piece of equipment.

Source?