On 11/3/2014 3:36 AM, Lostgallifreyan wrote:
rickman wrote in :

Recorded temperatures have always set new records. Just considering one
location, there are 365 days in a year and so 730 high and low records
to test. We have been recording temperatures for roughly 200 years.
What are the chances we *won't* set a new record for one of those dates
in a given year?


True, it's no great deal intself. And given the Maunder Minimum soem big
excursions can be expected, especially as the sun isn't following its usual
11-year pattern. On the other hand I remember people asking me in 1983 about
glonal warming, and me insisting that it did not just mean warmer, but
wetter, stormier, as well. There's no doubt that compared to thiry years ago
this has happened across most of thwe world. For a real balance of 'records',
we need to know how often the record for quietest, or closest approach to
average, conditions occured, and I have never heard the like. Generally,
if news is not exciting, it is not considered as news. Also, even when we had
unusual cold recently, it is arguable that climate conditions don't cause a
strong enough gradient to keep a strong division of temperature with
lattitude, and similar things can be said about the wandering of the jet
stream. Too many things look new, an the rate of broken records is increasing
when it ought to be decreasing if things were generally stable.


The problem is the Earth's climate is a very complex system. You can't
take a small area and project what's happening world-wide; things are
too interconnected.

This would be like taking one street in a big city and count cars going
by. If the number of cars goes down, you can't say "traffic in the city
is lighter" because there might have been an occurrence such as an
accident on a feeder road which is blocking up traffic.

At the same time, if the number of cars increases, you can't say
"traffic is heavier" - there might have been an accident in another
location and people are getting around it by using this street. It's
all tied together.

A perfect example with the weather is last winter. North America had
one of the coldest winters in recent years (due to the polar vortex
moving our way). But Europe and Asia had one of the warmest winters in
recent years; world-wide the average temperature increased.

The last figure I heard was that 95% of climatologists (people who
should know better than anyone else) agree that global warming is
occurring, as indicated by world-wide average temperatures. There is
still debate, even amongst them, how much man is responsible for this
warming. But still the vast majority believe that man is responsible
for at least some of the warming.

So, as rickman pointed out, (paraphrasing) with only 200 or so years of
tracking temperatures (even less than that in much of the Americas),
there is almost a certainty some locations will report record highs, and
some locations will report record lows.

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