7 ms·
I like the graphic; it's very scary. But why were they not inclined to put actual units in the x-axis. Kind of hard to compare what is "cold" vs "normal" vs "ho
by virtuexru 9y ago
I like the graphic; it's very scary. But why were they not inclined to put actual units in the x-axis. Kind of hard to compare what is "cold" vs "normal" vs "hot" without having some kind of basepoint reference.
- 09bjb 9y agoYeah absolutely. Without an explanation of what the units are it's worse than useless. "Here's a diagram of an arbitrary metric I invented. Scary, isn't it?" I'm no climate science denier but stuff like this just adds fuel to the fire. You might say we're just supposed to take it on faith ;)
- mturmon 9y agoI would counter that it's up to you to engage your curiosity and track back to the paper if you're interested in the particulars. You don't have to take it on faith, the link is right there in the article.
- mturmon 9y agoIf you track back to the 2016 paper, Fig. 6, you find similar graphs (not as pretty, not interactive) with this explanation: "Frequency of occurrence (vertical axis) of local seasonal mean temperature anomalies in unit of local standard deviation of Northern Hemisphere land areas." It takes some time to unwrap the words there. The "anomaly" is the difference of an observation at a particular place and time from a seasonal and/or regional mean value. As you probably know, anomalies are pervasively used in geosciences. So in essence he's standardizing into what in statistics would be called a z-score, z = (x - mu) / sigma where mu is the regional/temporal average, and sigma is the local standard deviation. I guess the above is probably the reason the NYT graphic did not explain it fully.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]