There has been a lot of talk lately about “climate change” (CC) in the news. There is also much talk about how it may be responsible for the string of hurricanes that have been and are currently battering the southeastern USA. The amount of fantastical thinking present in the “settled science” is almost beyond belief.
First off, let’s look at one of the big things that the CC advocates like to bring up. Time and time again we hear that the “global average temperature” is on the rise, and that we need to do something about it.
Let’s pause here, and examine just how silly the concept of an “average temperature” is, and how utterly worthless it is as any kind of predictive tool. First, here is a graph prepared by Bob Tisdale of the website Watts Up With That, constructed using absolute temperatures over the last 60-odd years.
Notice how difficult it is to tell anything useful from this graph. That’s just working with raw data. There are wide swings both up and down. Worse than that, as the article linked above (where the graph came from) shows, there are multiple techniques used to generate an ‘average’, all of which give different results, and none of which are scientifically based.
Say you have a thermometer in the back yard, and you go out, every hour on the hour for a full day, and take a reading from that thermometer. By the end of the day, you will have 24 readings. Those readings tell you what the temperature was at a given point in the day. You could average those temperatures together, but what would that number tell you? An “average temperature” is essentially a worthless number, because it bears little relation to what actually happened.
Let us consider an example from my locale. Yesterday, according to The Weather Channel’s website, the reported high was 85°, and the reported low was 64°. Now, if we take the average of those two numbers, we get 74.5°. But does this number, 74.5°, actually tell us anything? Sure, at some point in the day, the temperature must have been 74.5°, but for how long? Under what conditions? Was it cloudy? Was the thermometer in the direct sunlight, or in the shade?
Now, let’s expand on that, and look at the concept of a “global average temperature.” Scientists all over the world are taking temperature readings, in all kinds of different conditions. We can learn a lot from watching the way that temperature behaves in certain areas of the world. We can also possibly link observations on conditions (clouds, no clouds, shade, no shade, rain, dry, urban, rural, etc.) to those readings to better understand them. But when we talk about averaging them into a “global average” is when things start to get murky.
Sure, you could take the temperature readings from, for example, Washington D.C., and Topeka, KS, and average them. But what would that average be telling us, if anything? Those two places are vastly different in terms of both location and weather conditions. Were the readings taken at exactly the same times? What about the accuracy of the thermometers? What if the temperature from D.C. was taken at midnight, and the temperature in Topeka was taken at noon?
Average temperatures are, at best, statistical noise generated to push an agenda. To pretend that average temperatures hold any predictive or actual value is to essentially say the following: “Location on the globe doesn’t matter.” Sure, you could “average” the temperatures of London, UK and Canberra, Australia. Or Tokyo, Japan and Lima, Peru. Moscow, Russia and Houston, Texas. You can even take readings from all over the world, and average them together. Yet again, the result will be a largely meaningless number. Pretending like an average of conditions in such far-flung locations can tell us anything is pure hubris.
It is high past time that we, as a society, stop listening and giving credence to those who shovel meaningless numbers into our faces. They have an agenda, and this is yet another scare tactic to get people to fall in line. Screaming about “climate change” is just one more tool in the box for those who would see the flames of liberty and personal choices snuffed out. They always believe they know better, that only the enlightened elite can possibly rise above and guide us to the future. If they have to scare us into falling in line, so be it.