Friday, January 16, 2015

Chilling

termometro_tierra

News reports last week quoted scientists from the Global Warming crowd as saying the temperature of the Earth rose last year by 1.5° Fahrenheit. I’m not sure where they stuck their thermometer, but you can bet your ass it wasn’t anywhere near Houston, Texas.

The average annual mean temperature in Houston, recorded by the weather station at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, is 69.5°F, with an average daily high of 80° and a low of 60°.

Last year’s mean temperature here was about two degrees lower than 2013. And, for the first time in recent memory, we had no days – zero, zilch – when the official high temperature got as high as 100° 

So far, 2015 is helping Houston keep its cool.  The sun came out yesterday, breaking a 17 day streak of overcast days, and ending a 10 day run of temperatures below 50°.

My pro-warming-theory friends will be quick to point out that anecdotal evidence from a single location does not disprove Global warming; that it takes hundreds of readings from around the world to arrive at their average temperatures. 

They would be absolutely right!  It is a basic tenet of statistics that the greater the sample, the more accurate the result, but, like clipping the corners of a polyhedron to approach a circle, the best result is still only an approximation.  And, the result can be – it’s been alleged that it has been – greatly affected by the choice of which samples to record.

I’ll agree that local weather statistics don’t disprove Global Warming, but they do make it a lot harder to believe.

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