Comment by justsee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justsee | Hacker News Reader

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"June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe." (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-te...)

There is scientific consensus (http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-co...).

Your understanding of scientific consensus is not correct: "Consensus implies general agreement, though not necessarily unanimity." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus).

You clearly have an opinion on this topic, but everything you've asserted in this thread is simply wrong. Debate on these issues is always fine (even with a scientific consensus, it does not mean 'no further debate') but you do the opposing camp a disservice when you promote falsehoods.

Forgive the cheek, but you really should be doing this before assuming a position in a debate: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=scientific+consensus+on+global+warming

3.7 x 10-99 is a very small number. It's considerably less than the number of stars in our solar system.

The last 327 months of my life I have been taller than my average lifetime height.

Half of the human population has more testicles than the average person.

Statistics are fun when you throw them around.

No sorry, you're wrong: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3.7+x+10^99+%3E+stars+i... ( surely you weren't trying to make a point based on a typographical error?)

Your other points (if I can be that generous) are meaningless, so I'll leave them alone.

10 ^-99, not 10 ^99 - read it again.

My other points are not meaningless at all.

The temperature has been rising for ~150 years or more.

Of course the most recent half of the trend is higher than the average. It's meant to sound scary when it's just a plain fact that a rising trend will have most of the later part of the trend higher than the entire average.

A probability of the last part of a series being higher than the average would only be interesting if the series was random. The temperature series isn't random - it has a trend upwards. So the probability business is just nonsense. It's just a ridiculous way of saying the temperature series has trended up for a long time. (Long in human lifetime measurements, but not geological lifetime)

Hence : in the last 327 months of my life, I'm taller than my lifetime average. Because it would be very unlikely that the opposite would be the case.

Temperatures have not been rising for 150 years or more. You need to check your facts.

Direct instrumental measurements only go back ~150 years, but another direct mechanism exists: borehole measurements [1]. This gives us a very good measurement of temperature over ~500 years. These show that at no time have temperature averages been as high as they are now.

We can go back even further, to the tune of 1000 years, through proxy data obtained via things like tree rings, coral growth, stalagmite layers, etc. This covers the so-called "Medieval Warm Period" and these data show the last century to be warmer than any other in the data set.

Not enough? Antarctic ice core analysis provides a record of the glacial-interglacial cycle over 100s of thousands of years. These data show that current average temperatures are higher than they've been over the last 100,000+ years. This is documented in Figure 2.22 of the IPCC Third Assessment Report [2].

[1] http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/borehole/index.html [2] http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc%5Ftar/?src=/clim...

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