A colleague once told me, "If you torture data long enough it will confess to anything." During the cold spell, the local paper presented this as data.
I thought, hmmm... could this be real? Does it show a warming trend? It is thirty years of data. Well, I'm a statistical geek, it's cold out, and the days are short, so why not plot a few more years. Here's what they look like.
It looked so cool until it got a few more years. The last thirty years really said it's warmer. Not so when an additional 35 years are tossed in. The stretch from 1952-1956 with only one day of zero was really interesting. Why did I stop at 1944? I got bored.
I did find the distribution by month interesting, and scary. I was hoping we were near the end of the cold stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment