13 ms·

Hot or Not?

96 points by johmathe 4y ago

WalterGR 4y ago
Abstract: Non-expert who uses scare quotes liberally ("scientific consensus", "data science") finds that he's the only one who's figured out that the world is, in fact, cooling.
- h2odragon 4y ago
  Perhaps: "These plots of this dataset don't show extreme effect either way"
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    These plots, of these specific points of this dataset don't show extreme effect. These are just arbitrary cities. Not to mention that, most climate change stuff looks at the start of the industrial revolution, so a starting point of around 1920 is going to necessarily look a lot different.
    - mwint 4y ago
      Why would the start point make a big difference? Is the assertion that if it started at 1820, you’d see a stair step and then flat from 1920 on? Either way, these graphs look flat from 1920 on. That’s the point of the article.
Centigonal 4y ago
This is why "climate change" is a better term than "global warming." Weather is really really complicated. More greenhouse gases in the air results in more of the sun's energy staying in our atmosphere as heat, but how that affects the ground-level temperature in a specific city can be very, very complicated. Some areas might even become significantly cooler as climate change affects the weather. Plus, many of the worst effects of rising greenhouse gas levels (droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, algal blooms) are not a direct result of rising temperatures. A climate change indicator with fewer confounding factors than "ASOS temperatures for pseudo-random airports" is ocean acidity level [1] [2] (CO2 gets dissolved in our oceans and changes the pH, affecting marine life). Another one is sea level [3]. [1] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-ocean-acidity https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... [2] https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/ocean-acidification https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/ocean-acidification [3] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-sea-level https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > This is why "climate change" is a better term than "global warming." Indeed. The way I currently tend to think about the difference in my head is this: human activity has caused a large amount of extra energy to remain inside the atmosphere. Some of it is in the atmosphere itself, some in the oceans and lakes, some in ice, some in land. You can't trivially predict what a lot of extra energy will do when it ends up in such different storage "media". The obvious conclusion is "global warming", but there's no inherent reason for that to be correct. The extra energy could, for example, all go it into generating humungous sized and crazy fast storm systems, which would result in little change in temperature but very noticeable changes in weather and safety. Of course, it is unlikely that all the extra energy will be directed into a single phenomena, but the example is enough for me to remember that it's really non-trivial to understand what it could do, let alone predict what it will do.
truculent 4y ago
This is just a bunch of plots with no effort to engage with the existing literature and study. Frankly, it is a waste of time trying to draw conclusions about global warming from this.
- blangk 4y ago
  What if existing literature and study is somewhat biased by 'green' funding?
  - outside1234 4y ago
    - option_key 4y ago
      >and if necessary, turn off Fox News Quips like this aren't very productive if you want to convince others of your viewpoint.
  - blueblob 4y ago
    That would be a testable hypothesis that you have not tested. Anybody can do whataboutism but it isn't a meaningful argument. If it's your belief that the literature is biased by 'green' funding, prove it.
    - adamrezich 4y ago
      how would this be done, without being dismissed as being "just a bunch of plots with no effort to engage with the existing literature and study"?
      - sharkjacobs 4y ago
        Engaging with the existing literature would be a good start. If you were interested in studying the relationship between bias and funding you might do a survey of published papers and articles on the subject. If you can identify some measurable criteria that can be used to rate how "green" a paper's funding is then you can use that as an axis and compare the surveyed papers to reveal trends.
lakomen 4y ago
All I can say as a 47 year old who lived most of his life in Germany is that the summers when I was a teen, so 30 years ago were considered hot when they were over 25°C. This year in May we had 32°C. Deny or criticize all you want cherries blossoming on Christmas in Berlin is NOT normal. And neither is the absence of snow in winter and mild temperatures. Those graphs don't impress me at all, because I remember what it was like and see what it's like now. I'm in Croatia right now and remember where the sea level was back when I was little and also see where it's at now. If you lived on this planet for a while and are not ignorant to your surroundings you see the change, you feel it. Cold places are hot now and warm places are hotter for longer periods of time. I wrote it before and I'll repeat myself, if you look at what changed in the last 100 years or thereabout, it's mass burning of fossil fuels, the cars, fabrics, planes etc. Yes, I know don't jump to conclusions, scientific method and all. The not ignorant person just being observant and applying some common sense can see it bright as day.
- jl6 4y ago
  You can notice ~10cm difference in sea level? https://sealevel.nasa.gov/faq/13/how-long-have-sea-levels-been-rising-how-does-recent-sea-level-rise-compare-to-that-over-the-previous/ https://sealevel.nasa.gov/faq/13/how-long-have-sea-levels-be...
  - googlryas 4y ago
    You don't notice the vertical differences, you notice the horizontal distances (land that is covered which was not previously covered).
    - moonchrome 4y ago
      I'm a little bit younger than OP (~10 years) - I grew up on an island in Croatia and I noticed no difference in beaches that I visited when I was a kid. The shallow rock peers are all in the same place, beaches are the same size. Only difference I see is a slew of tourists packing every cm2 where there were far fewer while I was growing up, a lot of them getting off on how they are participating in "sustainable tourism" because their hotel has solar panels or whatever bullshit is trendy these days.
pc2g4d 4y ago
Why not produce an aggregate across all locations? I appreciate the value of getting up-close with the data to see quality issues, put things in context, etc. But the lack of an overall analysis leaves the most relevant question unasked, leaving us only with the author's biases (as they themselves admit.)
steve_avery 4y ago
I find this really cool, kudos to the author for trying to build up an understanding from the actual data. I find it interesting to see that the median temps in these select cities don't seem to be wandering up that much. I wonder if there is some statistical tool to analyze the slight upward angle on the linear regressions of the medians. I am surprised that these data do not show a more extreme departure. I believe that we are getting hotter temperatures, etc etc. But perhaps my observations are colored by the media on this - if I were a lizard, would I see climate change?
- kelnos 4y ago
  > I find it interesting to see that the median temps in these select cities don't seem to be wandering up that much. I can think of three possibilities: 1. The cold days have been getting colder, and the hot days have been getting hotter. The median temperature could still be somewhat constant in this scenario if the not-too-cold and not-too-hot days have temperatures that haven't changed much. 2. Even if the cold days have stayed roughly the same temperature, spikes and outliers in the hotter temperatures could still fail to move the medians that much. Consider that the median is often used to actively reduce the contribution of outliers to the data. Then it becomes a question of whether or not those spikes and outliers are meaningful or important. 3. Climate change is just a hoax (not something I believe, but it's certainly a "possibility").
cycomanic 4y ago
I think it's great for someone to download the data and try to do some analysis. However I would have wished he would have gone into the details a bit more. Separating between daytime/nighttime and summer winter temperatures would have been nice for example to dig doen into the data.
sumy23 4y ago
What is the delta-T in the graphs? I took that to mean delta from the average temperature, but then some of the graphs don't make sense. For instance, the fitted line for delta-T in the Stockholm data is entirely < 0, which wouldn't make sense if 0 represented the average temperature.
- fullshark 4y ago
  "The global median temperature (of the entire dataset) is uniformly subtracted from every data point, to keep things relative to an arbitrary x-axis of 0."
echan00 4y ago
Clickbait
outside1234 4y ago
tl;dr random plots of temperature from airports that is not nearly enough data to conclude anything given how complicated climate is
- misslibby 4y ago
  Are you sure the usual doomsday predictions are much more complicated?
  - wedn3sday 4y ago
    YES
jacquesm 4y ago
The scientific consensus is more than clear, doing your own "research" isn't going to make a difference except to engage with the people that are already happy to ignore science. If anything you'd have to begin to wonder in what ways airports are going to be different from global averages and I can think of a whole pile of reasons why the two would diverge (such as the presence of a large chunk of asphalt or concrete nearby). https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ For someone who worked at NASA and has a whole pile of claims to his name I would expect a far better researched piece of work. Thermometers placed randomly with a certain goal (to provide temperature data to pilots) and read out by people on irregular times during the day are a rotten source to extract climate change data from anyway.
- uniqueuid 4y ago
  Excellent point, and to add a bit: Scientific consensus does not mean the average of all opinions (i.e. "scientists on average believe in 2 degrees warming"), nor does it mean the average of all possible values of opinions ("there are people that believe in 2 degrees, and there are people that believe in 0 degrees"). These heuristics are wrong. It's a summary that needs to include reputation, credibility, trajectory of findings and a lot of structural knowledge of how the field has evolved over time. All of these are not things that an outsider can easily know to even look for.
  - misslibby 4y ago
    You are merely constructing an idealized authoritarian elite of scientists whom nobody can question because allegedly their craft is too complicated for mere mortals. Sorry, but no. A lot of people have an academic education, for example, and are capable of reading scientific papers. You have to be able to make a solid point that other people can verify. The last couple of years have already shown that institutions are also of little use. Don't confuse science with scientific institutions.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
airza 4y ago
Why would the median temperature be a useful measurement here? Quick, what is the median of these numbers: -2,-1,0,1,2 And what is the median of these numbers: -7,-1,0,1,2 Of course the average and median are identical for a perfectly distributed normal distribution. But part of science is supposed to be reducing the noise from your signal. Why are you adding noise in your quest to investigate the average temperature of the earth?
- glitchc 4y ago
  In the presence of outliers the median is a better predictor of underlying long-teem trends. Subtracting the median gives the delta from zero-median. The delta would be non-zero if there is a long term effect. Here the delta is zero in a number of cases.
  - airza 4y ago
    What is the concept of an outlier when you’re trying to measure if the earth is hotter than it used to be over a fixed length of time? If your hottest temperature 500 degrees, then sure, you may have an outlier that needs exclusion. But if all your coldest days are the same and your hottest days are 10 degrees warmer, your median might not move much. But that doesn’t make it look good for life on earth.
  - CrazyStat 4y ago
    > In the presence of outliers the median is a better predictor of underlying long-teem trends. Not if outliers are REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT, like, say, extreme weather events.
    - thehappypm 4y ago
      Outliers are likely to drag the averages down, not up. The only really substantial global outlier events are volcanic eruptions, which cause a net cooling. Everything else (hurricanes and the like) is just heat moving around
      - 4y ago
FranchuFranchu 4y ago
I think that this has good intentions, at least. Science should be easily reproducible. But using the median for this is very very silly, and I don't think the results from this are very meaningful.
- cleandreams 4y ago
  The claim that science should be easily reproducible is wrong. Take collider experiments, or huge data set analysis problems.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    The actual claim is that it is better if science is easily reproducible, but sometimes you just have to make do with what's feasible.
  - uniqueuid 4y ago
    Well, the goal is fair: It would be nice to have science reproducible. There are simply a lot of pragmatic (and ethical, and legal ...) reasons why it often is not.
correlator 4y ago
I enjoyed this and respect citizens who feel motivated enough to look at underlying data.. This type of discourse ("here is what I did and here is what I saw") leaves room to comment and make progress. People can discuss measurement methods, statistical analysis, and other objective things about a tightly scoped project like this. This is very clear reading the comments in the substack. A comment exchange that reminded me of my days in grad school: commenter: "What I think can be taken conclusively from this survey is that temperature is quite regionally variable, and there are a variety of different trends over time in these locations. Do you feel that there is some more significant conclusion that can be drawn from this?" author: "I am hesitant to draw any conclusions. I am more in a state of examining the data itself and asking questions."
- jacquesm 4y ago
  You can't really draw climate change conclusions from the input data though, that's the fallacy that breaks this whole article at the foundation. Let me rephrase that to make it even more clear: if climate change to date would be such that it would show up in datasets like these then we would not have needed any climate research to begin with. We're talking about 1 degree average change over a 60 year period across the globe. So that includes the oceans, the poles and a ton of other places where you won't find airports (or thermometers, for that matter).
  - correlator 4y ago
    You're not wrong. "I don't have the data or tools at my disposal to do this properly" Should not prevent you from trying, sharing, and learning. However, it definitely should prevent you from trying to change other people's minds.
    - thesz 4y ago
      The part of "it definitely should prevent you from trying to change other people's minds" clearly tries to change other people's minds. What data or tools do you have so that you are in the position to change other people's minds?
natch 4y ago
My hypothesis is that blogs that may possibly be mistaken for climate change denial are often associated with a recent or an impending purchase of an ICE vehicle and a need to rationalize the same.
drinkzima 4y ago
Has anyone found credible research around mean, min, max, average vis-a-vis climate change? Quick search didn't surface anything beyond lots of average temperatures and median forecasts, but less about the distribution of climate. Edit: trying to understand the decomposition of average temperatures increasing (more hot days, hotter hot days, etc)
- butterNaN 4y ago
  Have you checked https://interactive-atlas.ipcc.ch/ https://interactive-atlas.ipcc.ch/
adamrezich 4y ago
does anyone know what those giant gaps in the data are all about?
perrygeo 4y ago
This is a poor analysis. There's no justification for binning hourly temperature data into 3-year intervals and comparing the _median_ over time (an aggregate metric which ignores outliers, in a system where outliers drive the behavior of interest). Nor does this article perform any systematic test to confirm or deny a global trend - just pointing to some cherry-picked graphs with questionable assumptions and saying "hmmm" does not make an interesting analysis. Sorry, just don't publish shit like this unless you have something to say and viable data to back it up.
- tehsauce 4y ago
  ^This! For some reason people poking holes in his analysis are getting downvoted here. Strange.
tonymet 4y ago
Given the massive lack of trust in media, and to a lesser degree the popular science community, we need a more formal system of information similar to the justice system. In america the justice system has the judge (representing the state) and the jury (representing citizens). other countries have similar tribunals , each member with a different allegiance. For science, we need a strong and formal amateur tier to review and corroborate results. Though this exists now, it's not formally engaged with science reporting. and there's no method to compare amateur results to professional. What OP is doing here is bolstering amateur observation and he should be praised for that. I'd like to see research like this given more resources and exposure to build trust in scientific findings.
- cato_the_elder 4y ago
  > we need a more formal system of information similar to the justice system Ministry of Truth?
- butterNaN 4y ago
  Peer reviewing already exists. People who 'distrust science community' will simply distrust the new Institution you are proposing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tehsauce 4y ago
Seems a bit irresponsible to publish this analysis which seems to contradict an enormous body of scientific work (the public perception of which is quite crucial for human survival) without making any consideration of apparent discrepancies. It’s fine to observe something that seems off and write about it, but I think it would be appropriate to add “This most likely doesn’t disprove climate change, but I’m curious to dig deeper into the discrepancies”. If I wrote an article with data suggesting that drinking bleach is healthy, I’m obligated to add a disclaimer that says not to take this to heart just yet.
- misslibby 4y ago
  How big is the enormous body of scientific work?
  - tehsauce 4y ago
    “More than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans, according to a new survey of 88,125 climate-related studies“ https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/10/more-999-studies-agree-humans-caused-climate-change https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/10/more-999-studies-ag...
    - misslibby 4y ago
      I looked into the source of the 99% claims before, and in general, they don't say what you claim they say. They may find that most scientists agree that humans have an impact on climate, but that doesn't mean they agree on the doomsday scenarios.
- milosmns 4y ago
  It is in multiple places in the article, isn’t it?
  - tehsauce 4y ago
    Not really, the overall tone of the article is more like “my weekend project failed to produce results that agree with established ideas, everyone in that field are idiots because they have ‘science’ in their name”.
nqzero 4y ago
> I did not cherry pick. I just looked at each "interesting region" (interesting to me) ok google, define "cherry pick"
- adamrezich 4y ago
  cher·ry-pick /ˈCHerēˌpik/ verb choose and take only (the most beneficial or profitable items, opportunities, etc.) from what is available. "the company should buy the whole airline and not just cherry-pick its best assets" the author did not cherry pick. in order to cherry pick, the author needs to have had a predetermined thesis such that cherry picking only certain data points would bolster said thesis. instead, the author was looking to see what the deal was with long-term observed weather in specific places relevant to the author, then later expanded to include a few other locations as well. therefore, unless you are accusing the author of being dishonest, the author did not cherry pick.
  - cool_dude85 4y ago
    How do you know he didn't cherry pick these weather stations? One thing to say that it's not clear whether he did, another to claim - as you have in your post - that he did not.
    - mwint 4y ago
      Same problem exists with basically all research on the topic.
    - adamrezich 4y ago
      why would you assume the author's dishonesty?
downut 4y ago
My wife is an expert gardener, able to do wonders in Arizona at 5500'. She's been working the same plot of land for 25 years. The advance in the last frost day has been quite noticeable. For our plot (up on a ridge, so lows are warmer by up to 10F than the valleys below), it's usually about two weeks earlier. She's still wary, though, as she's lost entire beds of seedlings to outlier cold snaps in late May. Interestingly, there are animations of the changes in the hardiness zones over time: https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm Difficult to argue with that, I think.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  Interesting, thanks! It shows there has been significant change in the central part of the United States. Not much where I live in NH. And, I would have expected to see more change in California. Needless to say, this is not global climate change, which is what all the discussion is about.
quickthrower2 4y ago
The title is a pun on the defunct (probably?) amihotornot site of the early naughts.
tomjakubowski 4y ago
Looks like the hourly temperature plot graphs tend to get darker / "denser" as you look from left to right. Is that more data being available, more fluctuation, less fluctuation? What is that? I can also see some trends like the variation increasing. What's different when using another temperature data source? It would be nicer if the R source was just public without having to ask for it. The author is clearly a knowledgeable person, they still might benefit from asking themselves what they don't know before drawing any strong conclusions.
wedn3sday 4y ago
I think one of the issues here is that the plots just arent setup right for this kind of thing. The main take away plot of the least squares fit goes from -6 to +6, when a -1/+1 change is HUGE. The change only looks small because the plots vertical axis isn't formatted correctly. There are many additional areas of analysis you could do with this dataset, for example, although the temps may be in the same range, how have those temps changed seasonally? A warmer January and a cooler September can average out to what looks like no change annually, but a couple degrees warmer in January can have huge environmental affects.
charleshan 4y ago
"Visualizing temperatures around the world over the last 75 - 100 years" would be a better title for HN.
yellowapple 4y ago
The moment the author decided to ignore humidity and wind was the moment I knew the analysis would be flawed.
sumy23 4y ago
The issue with this piece of work is that the author hasn't even attempted to think of reasons for results he/she plotted. Simply presenting provocative data without adequate attempts to explain the results is irresponsible. People will take this data and say, "See global warming isn't happening!" but that is not the right takeaway. One possible explanation for the data is that, regardless of whether or not the Earth is getting warmer, cooler, or staying the same temperature, you would always expect some places to be getting warmer over a given time period, some places to get colder, and some places to stay the same. That's just a property of a random system. Without sampling enough points, you can't say how the global temperature is changing because you don't have enough data. Another issue is that the author largely chooses cities. It may be that cities are more likely to be built in an area if that area has a stable climate. As other have mentioned, even a 1 degree change is temp is significant, so the scale of the graphs is wrong too. A good illustration of how random systems can do weird things is this wealth simulator: https://www.masswerk.at/misc/wealth/ https://www.masswerk.at/misc/wealth/ In this simulator, 55 "participants" are given $45 and at each step in the simulation, each participant randomly gives another participant $1. Even though all of the action in this simulation is random, some participants typically acquire much more wealth than others. If you sampled random participants after N steps, some would gain money, and others would lose money. Rarely would the wealth of a participant stay the same. If you didn't understand the rules of the simulation, and were only presented with the data, you'd need to analyze data from all of the participants to conclude that total wealth had stayed constant.
the_third_wave 4y ago
I went to primary school in the Netherlands in the 70's. From those 8 years (2 years 'kleuterschool' (preschool) and 6 years 'lagere school' (primary school), a few high points: - we had 'tropenrooster' (tropical schedule) several times when the temperature went above 30°C, this entailed an early start to the school day so we could go home around noon. The main reason was that the heat in the class rooms was too much to bear. - roads were closed several times because of the asphalt melting from the heat - ...while at the same time I skated (as in ice skates) to school several times, once even over the roads when they were covered in a few cm of ice We had some hot summers and some cold winters, this was in the same period when there were warnings of "a new ice age". That ice age did not materialise just yet [1], nor did those hot summers mark the beginning of a trend. During my first years at university I lived in a little house on a farm somewhere in the countryside. The first winter I was snowed in for a week. The toilet froze, there was a snow ledge on the inside of the front door. The "Elfstedentocht" - a 200+ km ice skating marathon between 11 cities in Friesland - was held twice during my time at university after a hiatus of several decades. It has not been held since. All of this is anecdata but the story it tells is clear: it was hot back then, it was cold back then. It was hot in between, it was cold in between. It can be hot now, it can be cold now. It would be possible to draw a regression line in an attempt to show some trend but whatever it would show would be misleading, the period is too short and the data points too few. Have a look at the temperature graph for the Holocene [2] to see a trend line over a somewhat longer period, in this case about 11.800 years. Even there it is necessary to even out the bumps over several hundreds of years to get at the real trend which was a stark rise from ~11.800 years ago culminating in a maximum around ~8500-4000 years ago followed by a slow decline. Looking closer the "Little Ice Age", the Viking age warm period and the Roman warm period can be recognised, all of which had a large impact on human activities and development. As to whether the "Little Ice Age" never saw hot summers or the Viking/Roman warm periods never saw cold winters we can only assume they did, just like the supposedly cooler 70's saw some hot summers while the supposedly warmer 90's and early 2000's saw some cold winters. [1] ...or rather we are still in the same ice age as before, to be more specific in the Holocene interglacial period which is probably running on its last legs if previous interglacials are something to go by, just a few thousand years from now there will most likely be a new glaciation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene...
effnorwood 4y ago
b-team 4y ago
Summary: I spent a few days making graphs and now I am more qualified to opine on the existence of climate change than people who have been studying climate for decades using actual science and supercomputers.
fritztastic 4y ago
Temperature changes are only a small part of climate change. The majority of the concern has to do with ocean temperatures, sea levels, melting of permafrost, etc. how these cause changes in climate patterns, chemical changes to the oceans and atmosphere (besides GHG, water vapor affecting the ozone layer and UV) among many other factors, including extreme weather patterns- all of which affect the ecological balance in ways that may be disastrous as fauna and flora are not able to adapt at a fast enough pace to survive. Each of these things causes a domino effect of simultaneous chain reactions that also directly impact human life. Additionally these temperature readings don't factor the specific location of the thermometers, correlating variables specific to airports, the reality that climates of different regions are affected differently by climate change, among other considerations not explored. This seems like an overly simplistic "I am skeptical of scientists and science", when in fact climate change is much more complex than "temperatures are higher everywhere"- just looking at thermometers in airports isn't going to bring clarity or disprove the science that has been repeatedly warning about the impact of releasing excess greenhouse gasses for over a century now.
Arnt 4y ago
Uh. Paper records of measurements made to unspecified procedures are unimpeachable, while physical records available for laboratory inspection are not? From that somewhat unusual assessment of source data, he arrives at somewhat unusual conclusions.
kelnos 4y ago
Is median the appropriate thing to look at here, even? A big reason why you might use a median value when analyzing data is to reduce the effects of outliers. But when we're talking about climate change, aren't the outliers actually important to consider?

96 points by johmathe 4y ago

Abstract: Non-expert who uses scare quotes liberally ("scientific consensus", "data science") finds that he's the only one who's figured out that the world is, in fact, cooling.

h2odragon 4y ago
Perhaps: "These plots of this dataset don't show extreme effect either way"
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  These plots, of these specific points of this dataset don't show extreme effect. These are just arbitrary cities. Not to mention that, most climate change stuff looks at the start of the industrial revolution, so a starting point of around 1920 is going to necessarily look a lot different.
  - mwint 4y ago
    Why would the start point make a big difference? Is the assertion that if it started at 1820, you’d see a stair step and then flat from 1920 on? Either way, these graphs look flat from 1920 on. That’s the point of the article.

Centigonal 4y ago

This is why "climate change" is a better term than "global warming." Weather is really really complicated. More greenhouse gases in the air results in more of the sun's energy staying in our atmosphere as heat, but how that affects the ground-level temperature in a specific city can be very, very complicated. Some areas might even become significantly cooler as climate change affects the weather. Plus, many of the worst effects of rising greenhouse gas levels (droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, algal blooms) are not a direct result of rising temperatures. A climate change indicator with fewer confounding factors than "ASOS temperatures for pseudo-random airports" is ocean acidity level [1] [2] (CO2 gets dissolved in our oceans and changes the pH, affecting marine life). Another one is sea level [3]. [1] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-ocean-acidity https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... [2] https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/ocean-acidification https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/ocean-acidification [3] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-sea-level https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> This is why "climate change" is a better term than "global warming." Indeed. The way I currently tend to think about the difference in my head is this: human activity has caused a large amount of extra energy to remain inside the atmosphere. Some of it is in the atmosphere itself, some in the oceans and lakes, some in ice, some in land. You can't trivially predict what a lot of extra energy will do when it ends up in such different storage "media". The obvious conclusion is "global warming", but there's no inherent reason for that to be correct. The extra energy could, for example, all go it into generating humungous sized and crazy fast storm systems, which would result in little change in temperature but very noticeable changes in weather and safety. Of course, it is unlikely that all the extra energy will be directed into a single phenomena, but the example is enough for me to remember that it's really non-trivial to understand what it could do, let alone predict what it will do.

truculent 4y ago

This is just a bunch of plots with no effort to engage with the existing literature and study. Frankly, it is a waste of time trying to draw conclusions about global warming from this.

blangk 4y ago
What if existing literature and study is somewhat biased by 'green' funding?
- outside1234 4y ago
  - option_key 4y ago
    >and if necessary, turn off Fox News Quips like this aren't very productive if you want to convince others of your viewpoint.
- blueblob 4y ago
  That would be a testable hypothesis that you have not tested. Anybody can do whataboutism but it isn't a meaningful argument. If it's your belief that the literature is biased by 'green' funding, prove it.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    how would this be done, without being dismissed as being "just a bunch of plots with no effort to engage with the existing literature and study"?
    - sharkjacobs 4y ago
      Engaging with the existing literature would be a good start. If you were interested in studying the relationship between bias and funding you might do a survey of published papers and articles on the subject. If you can identify some measurable criteria that can be used to rate how "green" a paper's funding is then you can use that as an axis and compare the surveyed papers to reveal trends.

lakomen 4y ago

All I can say as a 47 year old who lived most of his life in Germany is that the summers when I was a teen, so 30 years ago were considered hot when they were over 25°C. This year in May we had 32°C. Deny or criticize all you want cherries blossoming on Christmas in Berlin is NOT normal. And neither is the absence of snow in winter and mild temperatures. Those graphs don't impress me at all, because I remember what it was like and see what it's like now. I'm in Croatia right now and remember where the sea level was back when I was little and also see where it's at now. If you lived on this planet for a while and are not ignorant to your surroundings you see the change, you feel it. Cold places are hot now and warm places are hotter for longer periods of time. I wrote it before and I'll repeat myself, if you look at what changed in the last 100 years or thereabout, it's mass burning of fossil fuels, the cars, fabrics, planes etc. Yes, I know don't jump to conclusions, scientific method and all. The not ignorant person just being observant and applying some common sense can see it bright as day.

jl6 4y ago
You can notice ~10cm difference in sea level? https://sealevel.nasa.gov/faq/13/how-long-have-sea-levels-been-rising-how-does-recent-sea-level-rise-compare-to-that-over-the-previous/ https://sealevel.nasa.gov/faq/13/how-long-have-sea-levels-be...
- googlryas 4y ago
  You don't notice the vertical differences, you notice the horizontal distances (land that is covered which was not previously covered).
  - moonchrome 4y ago
    I'm a little bit younger than OP (~10 years) - I grew up on an island in Croatia and I noticed no difference in beaches that I visited when I was a kid. The shallow rock peers are all in the same place, beaches are the same size. Only difference I see is a slew of tourists packing every cm2 where there were far fewer while I was growing up, a lot of them getting off on how they are participating in "sustainable tourism" because their hotel has solar panels or whatever bullshit is trendy these days.

pc2g4d 4y ago

Why not produce an aggregate across all locations? I appreciate the value of getting up-close with the data to see quality issues, put things in context, etc. But the lack of an overall analysis leaves the most relevant question unasked, leaving us only with the author's biases (as they themselves admit.)

steve_avery 4y ago

I find this really cool, kudos to the author for trying to build up an understanding from the actual data. I find it interesting to see that the median temps in these select cities don't seem to be wandering up that much. I wonder if there is some statistical tool to analyze the slight upward angle on the linear regressions of the medians. I am surprised that these data do not show a more extreme departure. I believe that we are getting hotter temperatures, etc etc. But perhaps my observations are colored by the media on this - if I were a lizard, would I see climate change?

kelnos 4y ago
> I find it interesting to see that the median temps in these select cities don't seem to be wandering up that much. I can think of three possibilities: 1. The cold days have been getting colder, and the hot days have been getting hotter. The median temperature could still be somewhat constant in this scenario if the not-too-cold and not-too-hot days have temperatures that haven't changed much. 2. Even if the cold days have stayed roughly the same temperature, spikes and outliers in the hotter temperatures could still fail to move the medians that much. Consider that the median is often used to actively reduce the contribution of outliers to the data. Then it becomes a question of whether or not those spikes and outliers are meaningful or important. 3. Climate change is just a hoax (not something I believe, but it's certainly a "possibility").

cycomanic 4y ago

I think it's great for someone to download the data and try to do some analysis. However I would have wished he would have gone into the details a bit more. Separating between daytime/nighttime and summer winter temperatures would have been nice for example to dig doen into the data.

sumy23 4y ago

What is the delta-T in the graphs? I took that to mean delta from the average temperature, but then some of the graphs don't make sense. For instance, the fitted line for delta-T in the Stockholm data is entirely < 0, which wouldn't make sense if 0 represented the average temperature.

fullshark 4y ago
"The global median temperature (of the entire dataset) is uniformly subtracted from every data point, to keep things relative to an arbitrary x-axis of 0."

echan00 4y ago

Clickbait

outside1234 4y ago

tl;dr random plots of temperature from airports that is not nearly enough data to conclude anything given how complicated climate is

misslibby 4y ago
Are you sure the usual doomsday predictions are much more complicated?
- wedn3sday 4y ago
  YES

jacquesm 4y ago

The scientific consensus is more than clear, doing your own "research" isn't going to make a difference except to engage with the people that are already happy to ignore science. If anything you'd have to begin to wonder in what ways airports are going to be different from global averages and I can think of a whole pile of reasons why the two would diverge (such as the presence of a large chunk of asphalt or concrete nearby). https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ For someone who worked at NASA and has a whole pile of claims to his name I would expect a far better researched piece of work. Thermometers placed randomly with a certain goal (to provide temperature data to pilots) and read out by people on irregular times during the day are a rotten source to extract climate change data from anyway.

uniqueuid 4y ago
Excellent point, and to add a bit: Scientific consensus does not mean the average of all opinions (i.e. "scientists on average believe in 2 degrees warming"), nor does it mean the average of all possible values of opinions ("there are people that believe in 2 degrees, and there are people that believe in 0 degrees"). These heuristics are wrong. It's a summary that needs to include reputation, credibility, trajectory of findings and a lot of structural knowledge of how the field has evolved over time. All of these are not things that an outsider can easily know to even look for.
- misslibby 4y ago
  You are merely constructing an idealized authoritarian elite of scientists whom nobody can question because allegedly their craft is too complicated for mere mortals. Sorry, but no. A lot of people have an academic education, for example, and are capable of reading scientific papers. You have to be able to make a solid point that other people can verify. The last couple of years have already shown that institutions are also of little use. Don't confuse science with scientific institutions.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

airza 4y ago

Why would the median temperature be a useful measurement here? Quick, what is the median of these numbers: -2,-1,0,1,2 And what is the median of these numbers: -7,-1,0,1,2 Of course the average and median are identical for a perfectly distributed normal distribution. But part of science is supposed to be reducing the noise from your signal. Why are you adding noise in your quest to investigate the average temperature of the earth?

glitchc 4y ago
In the presence of outliers the median is a better predictor of underlying long-teem trends. Subtracting the median gives the delta from zero-median. The delta would be non-zero if there is a long term effect. Here the delta is zero in a number of cases.
- airza 4y ago
  What is the concept of an outlier when you’re trying to measure if the earth is hotter than it used to be over a fixed length of time? If your hottest temperature 500 degrees, then sure, you may have an outlier that needs exclusion. But if all your coldest days are the same and your hottest days are 10 degrees warmer, your median might not move much. But that doesn’t make it look good for life on earth.
- CrazyStat 4y ago
  > In the presence of outliers the median is a better predictor of underlying long-teem trends. Not if outliers are REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT, like, say, extreme weather events.
  - thehappypm 4y ago
    Outliers are likely to drag the averages down, not up. The only really substantial global outlier events are volcanic eruptions, which cause a net cooling. Everything else (hurricanes and the like) is just heat moving around
    - 4y ago

FranchuFranchu 4y ago

I think that this has good intentions, at least. Science should be easily reproducible. But using the median for this is very very silly, and I don't think the results from this are very meaningful.

cleandreams 4y ago
The claim that science should be easily reproducible is wrong. Take collider experiments, or huge data set analysis problems.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  The actual claim is that it is better if science is easily reproducible, but sometimes you just have to make do with what's feasible.
- uniqueuid 4y ago
  Well, the goal is fair: It would be nice to have science reproducible. There are simply a lot of pragmatic (and ethical, and legal ...) reasons why it often is not.

correlator 4y ago

I enjoyed this and respect citizens who feel motivated enough to look at underlying data.. This type of discourse ("here is what I did and here is what I saw") leaves room to comment and make progress. People can discuss measurement methods, statistical analysis, and other objective things about a tightly scoped project like this. This is very clear reading the comments in the substack. A comment exchange that reminded me of my days in grad school: commenter: "What I think can be taken conclusively from this survey is that temperature is quite regionally variable, and there are a variety of different trends over time in these locations. Do you feel that there is some more significant conclusion that can be drawn from this?" author: "I am hesitant to draw any conclusions. I am more in a state of examining the data itself and asking questions."

jacquesm 4y ago
You can't really draw climate change conclusions from the input data though, that's the fallacy that breaks this whole article at the foundation. Let me rephrase that to make it even more clear: if climate change to date would be such that it would show up in datasets like these then we would not have needed any climate research to begin with. We're talking about 1 degree average change over a 60 year period across the globe. So that includes the oceans, the poles and a ton of other places where you won't find airports (or thermometers, for that matter).
- correlator 4y ago
  You're not wrong. "I don't have the data or tools at my disposal to do this properly" Should not prevent you from trying, sharing, and learning. However, it definitely should prevent you from trying to change other people's minds.
  - thesz 4y ago
    The part of "it definitely should prevent you from trying to change other people's minds" clearly tries to change other people's minds. What data or tools do you have so that you are in the position to change other people's minds?

natch 4y ago

My hypothesis is that blogs that may possibly be mistaken for climate change denial are often associated with a recent or an impending purchase of an ICE vehicle and a need to rationalize the same.

drinkzima 4y ago

Has anyone found credible research around mean, min, max, average vis-a-vis climate change? Quick search didn't surface anything beyond lots of average temperatures and median forecasts, but less about the distribution of climate. Edit: trying to understand the decomposition of average temperatures increasing (more hot days, hotter hot days, etc)

butterNaN 4y ago
Have you checked https://interactive-atlas.ipcc.ch/ https://interactive-atlas.ipcc.ch/

adamrezich 4y ago

does anyone know what those giant gaps in the data are all about?

perrygeo 4y ago

This is a poor analysis. There's no justification for binning hourly temperature data into 3-year intervals and comparing the _median_ over time (an aggregate metric which ignores outliers, in a system where outliers drive the behavior of interest). Nor does this article perform any systematic test to confirm or deny a global trend - just pointing to some cherry-picked graphs with questionable assumptions and saying "hmmm" does not make an interesting analysis. Sorry, just don't publish shit like this unless you have something to say and viable data to back it up.

tehsauce 4y ago
^This! For some reason people poking holes in his analysis are getting downvoted here. Strange.

tonymet 4y ago

Given the massive lack of trust in media, and to a lesser degree the popular science community, we need a more formal system of information similar to the justice system. In america the justice system has the judge (representing the state) and the jury (representing citizens). other countries have similar tribunals , each member with a different allegiance. For science, we need a strong and formal amateur tier to review and corroborate results. Though this exists now, it's not formally engaged with science reporting. and there's no method to compare amateur results to professional. What OP is doing here is bolstering amateur observation and he should be praised for that. I'd like to see research like this given more resources and exposure to build trust in scientific findings.

cato_the_elder 4y ago
> we need a more formal system of information similar to the justice system Ministry of Truth?
butterNaN 4y ago
Peer reviewing already exists. People who 'distrust science community' will simply distrust the new Institution you are proposing.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

tehsauce 4y ago

Seems a bit irresponsible to publish this analysis which seems to contradict an enormous body of scientific work (the public perception of which is quite crucial for human survival) without making any consideration of apparent discrepancies. It’s fine to observe something that seems off and write about it, but I think it would be appropriate to add “This most likely doesn’t disprove climate change, but I’m curious to dig deeper into the discrepancies”. If I wrote an article with data suggesting that drinking bleach is healthy, I’m obligated to add a disclaimer that says not to take this to heart just yet.

misslibby 4y ago
How big is the enormous body of scientific work?
- tehsauce 4y ago
  “More than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans, according to a new survey of 88,125 climate-related studies“ https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/10/more-999-studies-agree-humans-caused-climate-change https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/10/more-999-studies-ag...
  - misslibby 4y ago
    I looked into the source of the 99% claims before, and in general, they don't say what you claim they say. They may find that most scientists agree that humans have an impact on climate, but that doesn't mean they agree on the doomsday scenarios.
milosmns 4y ago
It is in multiple places in the article, isn’t it?
- tehsauce 4y ago
  Not really, the overall tone of the article is more like “my weekend project failed to produce results that agree with established ideas, everyone in that field are idiots because they have ‘science’ in their name”.

nqzero 4y ago

> I did not cherry pick. I just looked at each "interesting region" (interesting to me) ok google, define "cherry pick"

adamrezich 4y ago
cher·ry-pick /ˈCHerēˌpik/ verb choose and take only (the most beneficial or profitable items, opportunities, etc.) from what is available. "the company should buy the whole airline and not just cherry-pick its best assets" the author did not cherry pick. in order to cherry pick, the author needs to have had a predetermined thesis such that cherry picking only certain data points would bolster said thesis. instead, the author was looking to see what the deal was with long-term observed weather in specific places relevant to the author, then later expanded to include a few other locations as well. therefore, unless you are accusing the author of being dishonest, the author did not cherry pick.
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  How do you know he didn't cherry pick these weather stations? One thing to say that it's not clear whether he did, another to claim - as you have in your post - that he did not.
  - mwint 4y ago
    Same problem exists with basically all research on the topic.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    why would you assume the author's dishonesty?

downut 4y ago

My wife is an expert gardener, able to do wonders in Arizona at 5500'. She's been working the same plot of land for 25 years. The advance in the last frost day has been quite noticeable. For our plot (up on a ridge, so lows are warmer by up to 10F than the valleys below), it's usually about two weeks earlier. She's still wary, though, as she's lost entire beds of seedlings to outlier cold snaps in late May. Interestingly, there are animations of the changes in the hardiness zones over time: https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm Difficult to argue with that, I think.

wrycoder 4y ago
Interesting, thanks! It shows there has been significant change in the central part of the United States. Not much where I live in NH. And, I would have expected to see more change in California. Needless to say, this is not global climate change, which is what all the discussion is about.

quickthrower2 4y ago

The title is a pun on the defunct (probably?) amihotornot site of the early naughts.

tomjakubowski 4y ago

Looks like the hourly temperature plot graphs tend to get darker / "denser" as you look from left to right. Is that more data being available, more fluctuation, less fluctuation? What is that? I can also see some trends like the variation increasing. What's different when using another temperature data source? It would be nicer if the R source was just public without having to ask for it. The author is clearly a knowledgeable person, they still might benefit from asking themselves what they don't know before drawing any strong conclusions.

wedn3sday 4y ago

I think one of the issues here is that the plots just arent setup right for this kind of thing. The main take away plot of the least squares fit goes from -6 to +6, when a -1/+1 change is HUGE. The change only looks small because the plots vertical axis isn't formatted correctly. There are many additional areas of analysis you could do with this dataset, for example, although the temps may be in the same range, how have those temps changed seasonally? A warmer January and a cooler September can average out to what looks like no change annually, but a couple degrees warmer in January can have huge environmental affects.

charleshan 4y ago

"Visualizing temperatures around the world over the last 75 - 100 years" would be a better title for HN.

yellowapple 4y ago

The moment the author decided to ignore humidity and wind was the moment I knew the analysis would be flawed.

sumy23 4y ago

The issue with this piece of work is that the author hasn't even attempted to think of reasons for results he/she plotted. Simply presenting provocative data without adequate attempts to explain the results is irresponsible. People will take this data and say, "See global warming isn't happening!" but that is not the right takeaway. One possible explanation for the data is that, regardless of whether or not the Earth is getting warmer, cooler, or staying the same temperature, you would always expect some places to be getting warmer over a given time period, some places to get colder, and some places to stay the same. That's just a property of a random system. Without sampling enough points, you can't say how the global temperature is changing because you don't have enough data. Another issue is that the author largely chooses cities. It may be that cities are more likely to be built in an area if that area has a stable climate. As other have mentioned, even a 1 degree change is temp is significant, so the scale of the graphs is wrong too. A good illustration of how random systems can do weird things is this wealth simulator: https://www.masswerk.at/misc/wealth/ https://www.masswerk.at/misc/wealth/ In this simulator, 55 "participants" are given $45 and at each step in the simulation, each participant randomly gives another participant $1. Even though all of the action in this simulation is random, some participants typically acquire much more wealth than others. If you sampled random participants after N steps, some would gain money, and others would lose money. Rarely would the wealth of a participant stay the same. If you didn't understand the rules of the simulation, and were only presented with the data, you'd need to analyze data from all of the participants to conclude that total wealth had stayed constant.

the_third_wave 4y ago

I went to primary school in the Netherlands in the 70's. From those 8 years (2 years 'kleuterschool' (preschool) and 6 years 'lagere school' (primary school), a few high points: - we had 'tropenrooster' (tropical schedule) several times when the temperature went above 30°C, this entailed an early start to the school day so we could go home around noon. The main reason was that the heat in the class rooms was too much to bear. - roads were closed several times because of the asphalt melting from the heat - ...while at the same time I skated (as in ice skates) to school several times, once even over the roads when they were covered in a few cm of ice We had some hot summers and some cold winters, this was in the same period when there were warnings of "a new ice age". That ice age did not materialise just yet [1], nor did those hot summers mark the beginning of a trend. During my first years at university I lived in a little house on a farm somewhere in the countryside. The first winter I was snowed in for a week. The toilet froze, there was a snow ledge on the inside of the front door. The "Elfstedentocht" - a 200+ km ice skating marathon between 11 cities in Friesland - was held twice during my time at university after a hiatus of several decades. It has not been held since. All of this is anecdata but the story it tells is clear: it was hot back then, it was cold back then. It was hot in between, it was cold in between. It can be hot now, it can be cold now. It would be possible to draw a regression line in an attempt to show some trend but whatever it would show would be misleading, the period is too short and the data points too few. Have a look at the temperature graph for the Holocene [2] to see a trend line over a somewhat longer period, in this case about 11.800 years. Even there it is necessary to even out the bumps over several hundreds of years to get at the real trend which was a stark rise from ~11.800 years ago culminating in a maximum around ~8500-4000 years ago followed by a slow decline. Looking closer the "Little Ice Age", the Viking age warm period and the Roman warm period can be recognised, all of which had a large impact on human activities and development. As to whether the "Little Ice Age" never saw hot summers or the Viking/Roman warm periods never saw cold winters we can only assume they did, just like the supposedly cooler 70's saw some hot summers while the supposedly warmer 90's and early 2000's saw some cold winters. [1] ...or rather we are still in the same ice age as before, to be more specific in the Holocene interglacial period which is probably running on its last legs if previous interglacials are something to go by, just a few thousand years from now there will most likely be a new glaciation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene...

effnorwood 4y ago

b-team 4y ago

Summary: I spent a few days making graphs and now I am more qualified to opine on the existence of climate change than people who have been studying climate for decades using actual science and supercomputers.

fritztastic 4y ago

Temperature changes are only a small part of climate change. The majority of the concern has to do with ocean temperatures, sea levels, melting of permafrost, etc. how these cause changes in climate patterns, chemical changes to the oceans and atmosphere (besides GHG, water vapor affecting the ozone layer and UV) among many other factors, including extreme weather patterns- all of which affect the ecological balance in ways that may be disastrous as fauna and flora are not able to adapt at a fast enough pace to survive. Each of these things causes a domino effect of simultaneous chain reactions that also directly impact human life. Additionally these temperature readings don't factor the specific location of the thermometers, correlating variables specific to airports, the reality that climates of different regions are affected differently by climate change, among other considerations not explored. This seems like an overly simplistic "I am skeptical of scientists and science", when in fact climate change is much more complex than "temperatures are higher everywhere"- just looking at thermometers in airports isn't going to bring clarity or disprove the science that has been repeatedly warning about the impact of releasing excess greenhouse gasses for over a century now.

Arnt 4y ago

Uh. Paper records of measurements made to unspecified procedures are unimpeachable, while physical records available for laboratory inspection are not? From that somewhat unusual assessment of source data, he arrives at somewhat unusual conclusions.

kelnos 4y ago

Is median the appropriate thing to look at here, even? A big reason why you might use a median value when analyzing data is to reduce the effects of outliers. But when we're talking about climate change, aren't the outliers actually important to consider?