On 08/01/2013 06:35, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 1:06 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
given that weather patterns have been known to follow cycles at least
that long.
That is not a given. "Weather patterns" don't last for thirty years.
Perhaps you are talking about climate patterns?
Yes, that's what I meant. In any case, debate about global warming is
quite tangential to the point about statistical validity; it looks
quite significant to show a line going from the bottom of the graph to
the top, but sounds a lot less noteworthy when you see it as a
half-degree increase on about (I think?) 30 degrees, and even less
when you measure temperatures in absolute scale (Kelvin) and it's half
a degree in three hundred.
Why on Earth do you think that the distance from nominal surface temperatures to
freezing much less absolute 0 is the right scale to compare global warming
changes against? You need to compare against the size of global mean temperature
changes that would cause large amounts of human suffering, and that scale is on
the order of a *few* degrees, not hundreds. A change of half a degree over a few
decades with no signs of slowing down *should* be alarming.
--
Robert Kern
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
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