AGW discussion number 101

Incidentally, someone may notice a bit of a joke in the title.  There used to be a commercial for excederin pain reliever, which mentions a type of headache with a number associated with it--- ex., Excederin headache number 101.  These discussions may give you a headache, alright.  Tedious stuff, I suppose.

With an introduction like that, why bother?  Indeed.  But, I need to write something in order to have a blog.  Maybe you don't have anything better to do, so you come here.  If you are not a bot, that is.

Let's begin with the usual discussion about the weather.  Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it.  Until we got modern day liberals, that is.  Very nice of them to care so much about it.  Of course, they expect a fee for all their caring.

When the weather is hot, it is often described as hotter than normal.  Or when it is cold, it is colder than normal.  So they say.

Here's a bit of tedium.  ( maybe more than normal )  There is a mathematical property called a normal distribution that may or may not work in predicting weather observations, such as temperatures.  By the way, a normal distribution is also known as a "bell curve".  Observations of temperatures can be compared to this bell curve in way that tells us how far from the "mean" an observation is.  By mean we mean that it is nothing more than the arithmetic average of a set of temperature observations.  If this set includes temperatures for the last 150 years, then for any particular day of the year, there is a mean temperature for that date.  Any temperature observation may vary a bit from that mean.  This "variance" can be quantified into a number which is called the standard deviation.  Now, for a normal distribution, each observation should fall within plus or minus three standard deviations from the mean.  So, how do we know if a temperature is normal or not?  Well, maybe it fits this normal distribution.  Keep in mind though, that this distribution is only valid for that set of data.  Any new data may change the mean and the standard deviation, you see.

For people familiar with these mathematical concepts, I hope I didn't mangle it too badly.

One objection to how weather data is reported is that these concepts are usually mangled pretty badly.  If I think that, imagine what a statistician may think of weather reporting.

How do you know when weather is normal or not?  You don't have enough data.  You cannot predict the next 100 years from what has happened over the last 100 years.  For one thing, it isn't statistically valid.  You can certainly try to predict it.  But weather is pretty variable.  And the Earth is a lot older than 100 years.

Basically my objection is that a variance from the norm cannot possibly be based upon what we know, unless it is confined to our own experience, which is limited.  But the far past is outside that experience, and so is the far future.  That ol dog won't hunt in any kind of weather.

AGW theorists try to persuade based upon weather reports.  What a concept! /sarc