Numbers Don’t Lie

Numbers Don’t Lie was Originally Posted on September 19, 2014 by lavarock

“The Hottest Summer on Record” the newspaper headline reads. How hot is that?

Well, summer is defined as June, July and August in the Northern Hemisphere and they have been keeping records sine 1880. So for that 3 month period it was hotter than it ever was for the same 3 months since 1880. That is, hotter by 1.28 degrees that it ever was for the same period.

It is reported that we are “well on our way” to the hottest year EVER, that is since 2010 a mere 4 years ago.

So we were hot these 3 months, but overall, so far, not as hot as a few years ago.

Numbers.

When I had a big satellite dish I was watching an ABC news feed out of Alaska. It was cold. How cold was it? The guy they interview said it was the coldest he had ever seen! But there was an asterisk on that comment. Let me tell you why.

The feed was a raw video feed of a camera set up inside a supermarket, pointing towards the door as people came in to shop. The camera guy had no ability to edit the video before tonight’s newscast and the network was accepting the raw feed and would edit it for airing a few hours from now.

Oh it was cold outside, there was no disagreement. Cars wouldn’t start, people left them running so they wouldn’t freeze, and so on. COLD! People came in the supermarket, waving their arms, patting them on themselves, warming themselves up, and the guy behind the camera asked each one as they came in and they all said “It is cold” in one manner or another. However, they all but one said “but you should have been here last year”!

This one guy comes in and when asked “How cold is it out there”? and his response was that he had NEVER been so cold, never seen it so cold. Then again, he had just moved to Alaska from the lower 48 and had not been up there last year. Unfortunately THAT was the sound bite that hit the ABC Nightly News that night. I probably still have the whole feed on video tape because I used to love seeing raw feeds off the big dish.

Yes, the facts on the newscast were correct, that guy had never seen it so cold up there. The news clip was accurate and it also showed that it was cold up there, but was it the coldest it had ever been? No. And according to those interview, even beat last year. That also doesn’t say that the year before that wasn’t colder; the subject just never came up.

Also, people started recording temperatures in 1880. Why? Perhaps because 1880 had some kind of temperature extreme or trend and people wondered if it was hotter or colder than another time. Ahh so your next question has to be, well, they probably invented the thermometer then and could not have recorded temperatures before then. I, like you, didn’t know when they invented the thermometer so I just looked it up. Seems it was probably invented in 1611 when they put a scale to their device which reacted to temperature. The word “thermometer” was coined in 1638.

There are usually asterisks to these things. Wettest period since, hottest, coldest, driest; and that is just weather related. Often those adjectives refer to the last 10 years, not forever since man walked the earth. I guess people figure we can’t remember or don’t care about any period longer than perhaps we spend in high school and college plus a bit.

But this blog entry is not about global “climate change”, only that we can make numbers mean anything we want if we try. I can get 5 doctors here and put them each on camera and have 4 of them swear that my coffee is the best! 4 out of 5 doctors agree. Yet I might have asked 100 and found these 4 and then thrown in one who disagreed.

I used to use a saying that ended in essence as “every Tuesday, except when the Rotary meets”, the ‘Rotary’ being a service organization here in the states. To be more accurate, they are in 199 OTHER COUNTRIES but I am only mentioning this one. See the trap we fall in. We assume one set of facts based upon numbers. There are 30,000 members in Africa which seems like a lot for that size of a continent, but North America boasts 450,000. You could compare the land mass of both places vrs the number of members, or compare them based upon possible members in each area. Then again from 1905 to 1980, women were not allowed to be members, so the numbers could get skewed based upon how you report them. Here, our politicians use numbers to their advantage and might report the upsurge in members in that type of service organization sine 1945. However as I say, the numbers would be skewed because many countries disbanded their service organizations because of the war and not all countries started them back up at the same time, nor allowed women in the main organization (they may have segregated women to a different ‘sister’ organization”.

So when you see numbers, take them with a grain of salt. Also keep in mind that salt is so common that we tend to toss it over our shoulder for good luck and spread it on the road for better traction when it snows. Yet salt, that common item USED to be so important to us that we used it as currency to buy things! They began harvesting salt over 6,000 years ago. The scarcity and universal need for salt has led nations to go to war over salt and use it to raise tax revenues. Yet we now realize that 2/3 of the world, our oceans, are filled with it! In fact, 1.2 oz per liter of salt water. If we could just grab a few pounds of it and go back in time…

There you have it, NUMBERS. Numbers don’t lie. 87%** of my blog readers agree*

* Agree is defined as not disagreeing or having no opinion, or  actually having an opinion but not wanting to publicly state it, or probably having an opinion but being in a coma and physically not able to indicate one way or another and also including those who didn’t understand the question, or questioned their understanding of the survey

** Percentages may not equal 100% due to rounding errors. Some survey respondents were not included if they had participated in a previous survey about recent climate issues

Your mileage *may* differ!