Tracking Crucial Metrics of Earth's Global Warming (opens in new tab)

I would consider that "anomaly" would refer to something unusual or unexpected, an outlier, or a weird unexplained occurrence contrary to our expectations, or a one-off deviation followed by a return to the norm.

On the other hand, a continuously changing mean or a systematic pattern IMHO is not an "anomaly"; something can't be unusual for long - if something has become or is clearly going to become usual, then it's a "new normal", it's a "trend" or something like that, but not an anomaly anymore; if we're seeing what we expected to see, that can't be called an "anomaly" because that's the expected result.

With respect to climate change we see that the underlying factors have changed, we mostly know why, we observe the consequences now, see their trends and can predict how the mean is going to change - so all the factors are contrary to the definition of "anomaly".

I don't think that explanation is correct. The average temperature of a year is just a specific way to take a measurement. Comparing it to an average of averages over several years is then the same as comparing a measurement to an average of measurements.

That the climate should never see averages changing seems obviously false. There clearly are cycles that last longer than a year, for example, as several ice ages came and went before industrialization. El Nino take phases last between two and seven years.

It is a technical term meaning difference to the average of a certain period of time. In itself such a difference to the average does not imply anything strange is going on. I'm not saying there isn't an anomaly in the sense of common speech, it just seems weird to me to use it in charts that are supposed to show the existence of an anomaly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_anomaly

I think the point parent is making is that it is possible to cherrypick a reference period.

You can say that the melting of glaciers is an anomaly but when an ancient forest appears below the melted glacier how can we agree on what an anomaly is?

I don't want to deny global warming but I agree with the parent that it's difficult to state what an anomaly is.

They use the term anomaly strictly in a technical sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_anomaly

It means the difference to the average of a certain time frame. Whether it was caused by human activity is a different question. That is why I call it misleading. They certainly want to imply humans caused it, but at the point where they show the chart they haven't really shown it. That requires considering other aspects.

The fastest shifts occurred after large volcanic activity. And cold summers for a few years then led to crop failures.

Am really interested in more analysis of correlation of reduced sunspot activity and then increased volcanic activity. It appears to be a fascinating correlation.

Update - The mammoths with undigested grass in their stomachs, which froze to death while eating, may indicate magnetic pole flip creates faster climate change than volcanic activity.

No they picked a certain time frame and compare to the average temperature of that time frame. Nothing more, nothing less. I think the reference time frame is some 20 year period in the end of 20th century, but not sure if I remember it correctly.

I have nothing against the comparison, just with the choice to call the deviation from the average "anomaly".

I think in one step you should present the data, making sense of it is another step. Technically "anomaly" is just used for the distance to the average of some chosen timeframe, but in common language terms it suggests something unnatural is going on. As I said, it would be unnatural to have exactly the average temperature every year. (It may still be such an extreme difference that it is unnatural, but that is not how they use the word anomaly. It just means different from the average).

The non-purely-materialistic dimension of reality (the part that prevents humanity from actually doing anything substantial about climate change) unfolds according to people's perceptions of reality, not reality itself (which we do not see, even though it seems to be the exact opposite of that). It may be enjoyable to look down one's nose at the unintelligent, but realize that intelligence is a spectrum and the sense one has that they are at the apex of that spectrum is illusory.

Science is a very useful tool, but it is not the only tool we need to deal with this problem, and it is certainly not the best tool for dealing with the most important unsolved (and seemingly not even realized) aspect of it: the human mind.

I think we need to start thinking very differently about this problem - one approach (applied to a different domain) is described in this[1] post, I think it would provide more value than more and more scientific statistics, which seem to be accomplishing very little.

[1] Sociotechnical Lenses into Software Systems

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282715

I mean people trying to show or prove the effects of climate change. Whether you believe in it or not, there supposedly are specialists working in that area. At least that is usually the argument, that there are experts who worked it all out whom we should listen to. So I think those can be called "climate change circles".

There isn’t enough temperature record around before that timeframe to estimate an accurate global average. You can still see the effects of temperate indirectly

Any air moving towards the poles must necessarily be balanced by air moving away from the poles. This manifests as "Hadley cells" and other similar wind patterns.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Ea...

Charts and visualisations are a great way to trick people. Not only is the source data obscured (and so readily cherry picked) but it opens up all sorts of tricks around visual perception.

I also suspect most people yet to be convinced will immediately think back to Al Gore's infamous hockey stick chart when presented with visual simplifications of deeply complex climate data.

At the heart of the matter, looking at such a chart isn't meant to inform you, it is meant to elicit an emotional response, and they have been trained to respond with skepticism.