Sunday, January 17, 2021

The hottest year baloney again with a precision of two decimal places

Recommendable! Supposedly, the year 2020 was one of the hottest years ever!
There lies, damned lies, and statistics!

"... As those who survived even high school statistics know, if you measure two things to one decimal place then multiply them together, you may well get a result with two decimal places. For instance 4.2 times 5.6 is 23.52. But unless the inputs were exact, that is, they are known to have been 4.20 and 5.60, their product is actually less precise than either initial number; it is the uncertainties that multiply not the certainties.

Suppose for instance the inputs have been rounded to one decimal place and the range of real possible starting values stretches from 4.16 to 4.24 for the first and 5.56 to 5.64 for the second. And if you multiply the two lower boundary numbers and the two higher boundary numbers, that is, 4.16 times 5.56 and 4.24 times 5.64, the range of results goes from 23.05 to 23.91. Meaning suddenly the uncertainty is not one decimal place, let alone two, but a whole number. ...
For instance Spain, which just set an all-time record low temperature and suffered a massive, lethal snowstorm. ... China also experienced a massive cold spell including an all-time record low in Qingdao and Beijing’s lowest Jan. 7 low in over half a century. Iran had lethal snowfalls.

Going back to “pre-industrial times” is another major piece of statistical legerdemain that ought to be called out, and not only because we do not know what the temperature of any place was to a decimal place and for almost the entire land surface, and the entire ocean, we have only proxies involving wild uncertainty. ...
The total surface of the Earth, land and sea, is about 500 million square kilometers, 70% of it water. So if you took 500 million evenly spaced measurements every day, without which it’s hard to claim you know what the “average” temperature was for the year, you’re still only sampling one square centimetre per square kilometer for one minute out of 1440 each day. Which is one ten-billionth spatially and less than one one-thousandth temporally, which multiplies together to one-trillionth of the actual temperature being read. To claim on that basis to know it to two decimal places and declare a tie is worse than fatuous."

As hot as two decimal places | Climate Discussion Nexus

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