Bruce Hall, on his blog Hall of Record, has done a very interesting piece of analysis that takes several posts over the past week. It’s a great example of one of my favorite kinds of analysis: the “sniff” test, or a quick test to see whether a hypothesis correctly predicts something.
The hypothesis in Bruce’s case was global warming. Not what’s causing global warming, but the simple hypothesis that there is global warming. Bruce thought that if our globe was really getting warmer, then we should be able to see evidence of that in climate records. And it just so happens that the United States has been keeping widespread and very accurate temperature records for over 100 years.
So Bruce had this interesting — and testable — thought. If global warming is a real phenomenon, then surely it should be true that we’re setting more record high temperatures in recent years than we have in past years. It turns out that this data is readily available. Bruce got the data, did the analysis, and (in his words):
Sorry, but I just don’t see “global warming” in these extremes. It must be happening on some other part of the globe. CO2 is just not doing its job.
Go read the whole thing (and check out his very useful graphs).
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