A reader Comments on what I said yesterday about 70 Degrees in Madison:
These sensational posts do nothing to educate or support/promote discussions about climate change. It just confuses the discussion because the weather of the day means almost nothing about climate change. Deniers can easily refer to historical data, and it's clear that 70-degree weather doesn't even rank among the 20 warmest March days in Madison, Wisconsin's history.
Okay, 70 degrees Matches the maximum temperature on March 3 (1983). If the reader noticed the upward trend in Madison's highs and lows, he/she would understand that 70 degrees might not be that dramatic.In fact, in the figure The post he/she is commenting on (Reprinted below for completeness), you can see that by March 31, the 90th percentile temperature was only 5 degrees below the recorded 70 degrees. Therefore, I can only conclude that readers are blind, or deliberately obtuse, or dishonestly commenting on the March (whole month) record. (Why do we provide percentile bands when people who supposedly know statistics ignore them?)
notes: Green+ indicates the forecast high for March 3, 2024, in Madison, Wisconsin. source: weatherspark.comviewed on March 3, 2024.
How important are temperature trends? Here is a map:
source: Wisconsin Climate Change Impact Initiative.
Here's another image using Wisconsin data:
source: NOAA National Cancer Center.
More broadly, and across the country, starting with Saturday's first article.
source: Gonlov, “3 seasons in 24 hours put climate change deniers in trouble,” Bloomberg.
While the second map does not have a statistically significant indicator, the first map does.
Since the observation on March 3rd (in the first graph) is above the 90th percentile, I might consider this a somewhat unusual event (I want to use this word colloquially). However, I'm sure readers of the review will find some reason to disagree.
More generally, here are the global (land/ocean) temperature anomalies listed by NOAA:
figure 1: Land-ocean global temperature anomalies, tracking monthly (blue) and 12-month moving average (red). Source: NOAA and author's calculations.
