I was watching the weather report on Saturday night, and the weatherman showed the daily temperature data. It showed that we had an above average high that day of 60 degrees. The average or, as he put it, "normal" high for March 15th in Cincinnati is 53 degrees. The implication of this statement is that any time the high on March 15th is anything besides 53 degrees, it is not normal. Do you think that is right? 54 degrees is above normal in Cincinnati on March 15th. It certainly is above average, but that doesn't mean above normal. If the temperature here was very consistent like it is in a cave thousands of feet below the Earth's surface, then 1 degree above average would be above normal. However, the high temperature in most places on the surface of the Earth varies with a standard "bell" curve distribution. That means that 68.2% of the time, the high temperature will fall between plus or minus one standard deviation of the average temperature. So what is the standard deviation of the high temperature on March 15th in Cincinnati? I don't know, but it seems that normal might be defined as the range of temperatures that occurs 68.2% of the time.
Of course, this statistical math seems to make everyone's eyes glaze over. It's no wonder that the weatherman doesn't talk about a range of high temperatures that constitutes normal. There is a simple way to handle this. Just refer to the average high as the average high temperature. Quit trying to change the mindset of people watching the weather forecast using questionable wording. 53 degrees is not the only normal high temperature for Cincinnati on March 15th, and the weatherman shouldn't make it out to be this way.
There was another interesting tidbit in the daily temperature data presented in that weather summary. It was a pretty warm day compared to the rest of this winter of 2014 with the high being 60 degrees. However, it was nowhere near the record high of 82 degrees. With all of this global warming hoopla we've all had drilled into our heads, that record was probably set within the past couple of years. Do you think we hit 82 degrees in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, or 2013? If you guessed one of those years, you would be off a little bit. That record was set in 1944. That's kind of interesting. Was there global warming in the 1940's. You might think so, because the all time warmest average temperature for the month of March was set in 2012, and it broke the old record set in 1946 for Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, and a number of other cities in Ohio. Other cities in the area had high average temperatures in March of 1921, 1945, 1973, and 2000. You would guess that 1921, 1945, 1946, 1973, and 2000 were all relatively hot years for all the cities in the same general area, so the statistics seem to indicate that some years are hot, while others are not. I don't see a general trend towards hotter and hotter years recently. In fact, it looks like those really hot years are spaced out by about 25-30 years.
It should be noted that these record temperatures aren't the highest temperatures we've had here since Adam and Eve invented the thermometer and started writing down the temperature every hour. We have temperature data going back to about 1880. One might wonder about the accuracy of the data in the early part of that 134 year span. In any case, with 130 years of data for a planet that is somewhere between 5000 and millions of years old, you can't show much of a trend. The scientists have told us that an ice age came and went millions of years ago. How did the ice age end? Didn't we have global warming that started at the peak of the ice age? I guess the cave men and women were driving around in gas guzzling SUV's and burning coal.
Hearing mental midgets like Al Gore or Michael Moore or Barack Obama running around talking like they are scientists is infuriating. They are the MessAPolitico. They've made a mess of politics, which is their area of expertise of course. Why should you believe that they know anything about science? When they pay out billions in grant money to scientists to prove that global warming is man-made, what would you expect the results to be? I guess they don't realize that real scientists would set out to learn what is going on rather than trying to prove something is true so they can collect a payday.
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