Weather forecasts in the news are okay to help promote 1-3 day = preparedness but talk about climate in very unilluminating ways. Who came up with the dumb idea of tracking "record" temperatures in convoluted sportsball ways?
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Statements like "the most 90+ days in July since 1948" conveys almost no insight manage to produce a geewhiz "news" effect without actually conveying any insight at all into what's happening locally.
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The obvious answer is to use the sort of control charts used in engineering for statistical quality control of processes to show secular drifts in volatile signals etc. Can be adapted for everything from flooding and fire severity to increasing severity/mildness of winter etc
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We argue about such charts only in the most far-removed cases where most of us have zero personal data to think about. Like million-year carbon levels and ppms. Leave that to the experts. Give us grokkable views of *local* climate trends using things we can sense like snow/rain.
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And these aren't hard to learn to read btw. They are in fact *much* easier to read and grok than the ritualistic sportsball-record type views of what's going on. High school grads learn to use such views of data in factories all the time. It's not that hard.
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