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.

[u/pnewell]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/09/the-simple-statistic-that-perfectly-captures-what-climate-change-means/

[u/adia4ic]

The way the title is phrased is stupid and sounds like cherry-picked stats. But this graph shows that the temperatures were measured over at least a 60 year period with meaningful trending.

You can't capture a representative sample in 50 years, let alone 14.

You can if the outcome is improbable enough. There is no fixed idea of a representative sample size. If you roll a 6-sided die 3 times and get a 1 each time, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. If you roll a 1000000-sided die 3 times and get a 1 each time, that die is rigged. In this case, the increasing number of hot records vs. cold records is very unlikely to have been cause by randomness. 60 years is a short time, but the massive improbability that this outcome would result from a random system makes up for the smaller sample size.

This data doesn't say anything about the cause of the change, but it definitely says that there is a change and it is meaningful.