A viewer asked me to elaborate on why average temperature is useless and what I think about the extreme weather events.
I’ll try and summarize what I said.
First, temperatures don’t add like masses or velocities. They don’t multiply or divide in any meaningful way either. This is because the temperature is not a quantity that you add or subtract or multiply or divide. It is a measure of how many ways energy can be allocated in a system. Cold objects have many more ways to allocate energy than hot objects. Energy flows from hot to cold precisely because it is more likely that the energy will do so.
The only reason why we use average temperature at all is to analyze historic temperatures to try and make predictions about the future. This has two problems. One, the deviation of historic temperatures is so wide that the average is practically useless. Two, the earth’s climate is always changing so past behavior may not reflect future behavior. The only real conclusion we draw from looking at temperature statistics is that meteorologists don’t like to share their confidence intervals and no one is surprised when they get it so, so wrong.
Regarding unusual or extreme weather events, the fact is this: The weather is no more or less extreme or unusual than it has always been. Go back and read newspapers from the 20s and 30s and you’ll find that the weather is actually a great deal more calm than it used to be. Again, there’s that nasty “confidence interval” that makes any kind of average or prediction utterly useless.
People (I don’t dare call them scientists because what they do is certainly not scientific) use models to try and predict what the weather might be in the future. They train these models on historic data and then see which ones give them results they like. The models that fail to give desired results are banished, while the ones that make predictions the people want to see are elevated. What is often touted as extreme weather isn’t the weather at all, but predictions from these hand-selected models.
Good models are impossible to develop, because the underlying physics is inherently chaotic. In the old Jurassic Park movie, the scientist explains that chaos theory is like a drop of water on the knuckle of your hand. It could roll off one way or the other and no one can predict it. While technically true, the essence of chaos theory is not only can it not be predicted, but the predictions are so outlandish that a butterfly in Africa could be blamed for a hurricane wiping New York off the map. A better analogy would be putting a drop of water on your knuckle and watching the sun get extinguished because of it. That’s real chaos theory, and that’s what we are dealing with. We can’t even predict what might happen if we dropped a nuclear bomb on a hurricane forming in the ocean. It might make it worse, or better, or do nothing at all, and we cannot possibly understand which it will be.
Regardless of all the above, the people behind these wild predictions about unusual or extreme weather are the same people who lied and lied again, refuse to share their raw data, and lie some more just for good measure. I have lost all trust in the industry a long time ago, and nothing they have done has restored any of it.
If you want to believe in the mythos that they peddle, you are free to do so. Just don’t force me to go along with it.