Quote:
Originally Posted by crockett
The reason the term global warming became popular, was because the "average" yearly temp of the earth is warming. If you know anything at all about math, (hope they taught math in your school) you will know that with averages there are always high and low numbers and the center is... You guessed it the average..
Well the average global tempture is in fact warming. Yes, some years it might be cooler allowing your favorite Fox News mouth piece to declare victory over science because they are awesome and all. Yet year after year the globe is getting warmer.
|
Actually average, or arithmetic mean, is not the center. That would be the median.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_mean
Quote:
|
While the arithmetic mean is often used to report central tendencies, it is not a robust statistic, meaning that it is greatly influenced by outliers (values that are very much larger or smaller than most of the values). Notably, for skewed distributions, such as the distribution of income for which a few people's incomes are substantially greater than most people's, the arithmetic mean may not accord with one's notion of "middle", and robust statistics such as the median may be a better description of central tendency.
|
The notion of a reliable measure of "average" annual global temperature is ridiculous. It is purely agenda driven.