Good points Expanso. I was trying to be not pedantic and Colibri answered my question satisfactorily above.
I was trying to see if there was confirmation bias present in our current observation of weather events.
It looks like you are a Statistics Guru, so maybe I should have phrased the question to you as “ If I take the average daily temperature of Oklahoma City for 2008-2018 and do a T-test against the same data for 1908-1918, what will be the outcome ?” Maybe that’s not the correct question either.
The main lesson from the above discussion for me is that local weather events and short term weather effects do not prove or disprove Climate change. At the individual level (unless you are observing glaciers or sea levels or animal migration) you will not observe Climate change at a statistically significant level.
Observable by human senses? A couple come to mind:
I moved to the Sacramento area about 19 years ago. I remember great tule fog banks during winter. Sometimes you would not see the sun for days. People in the higher-elevation Sierra foothills like to brag “Below the snow, above the fog.” However, for the last maybe 8-10 years, very few week-long winter fogs. In fact hardly any days-long fog events. Maybe there are some stats on the decline of fog-related traffic accidents in the Sac-Joaquin valleys in recent years?
I went to Mexico in 2004 and observed these noisy and showy black birds with an almost electric sounding array of calls, the Mexican Grackle. I had never seen or heard one of these before. Today, they patrol parking lots everywhere in my area. Perhaps these birds have made a recent northern push?
Great-tailed Grackles (the official name of the “Mexican Grackle”) have indeed been expanding their range northward in recent years, especially in the west. However, part of this is their expansion into human-modified environments.
Northern Mockingbirds were unheard of in the New York City region when I was growing up in the 1950s. Now they are very common. Other species have experienced similar range expansion northward.
Colibri - I am not doubting your account or Climate change.
I am questioning if observations such as this one on Mockingbirds has some degree of confirmation bias associated with it. Can we say certainty ( with reasonable p number) that the Mockingbird’s range expansion is Caused by climate change. Or is this just a correlation and maybe there are other factors at play like it’s natural habitat destruction or urban shelters or urban food availability etc ?
To continue the point we have been trying to make, single observations or observations of single species don’t prove anything. But when you see the same kind of correlated range expansions northwards in dozens of species that confirms the pattern. Science consists of testing falsifiable hypotheses. So it could be tested whether the northward expansion is correlated with increased temperatures or other factors such as urbanization.
Opening of the Northwest passage is a pretty good indication. Even in the 1970s a Swiss told me that the Rhone glacier had retreated from 2000 m to 3000 m in the last century. I wonder where it is now 40 years later.
That’s close enough for government work … it can be 2ºF different just a quarter mile away … so any higher precision doesn’t really give us any new information … it’s expensive laying out a network of weather stations and we have to leave them out in the weather … installing and maintenance of these stations fall on NOAA’s shoulders and all the other research and civilian interests just use that set of data …
Averaging temperatures over years gives us a number … we have to remember that any specific temperature reading may be far away from this average temperature, what would be called a large standard deviation … what ever else is said of this, a few degrees either way on the daily measurements (or hourly) isn’t changing the warming tread over these past 100 years …
I agree with Colibri … the intense biological reaction to even small changes is pretty obvious year-to-year … and certainly decade-to-decade …
This is easily studied and of course has been. It is again the difference between individual data points and statistical correlation. Many, many different results in many, many different fields observed at many, many different places all correlate with global warming and the effects that can be predicted to have in specific localities.
Correlation is not causation, as everybody will quickly say. The problem with writing all these patterns off is the utter lack of any other known cause that can account for them. Other explanations have of course been examined, from the logical - increased solar radiation - to the pseudoscientific - increased heat from the earth’s core. None produced the required correlations. That’s also an important point. Correlations must exist with any postulated cause, and those can be predicted through models. Our models are not perfect and neither is our data but at this moment nothing is a plausible replacement for the effects of CO2 and the other greenhouse gases.
Wrong. This year, maple syrup production in Wisconsin will be higher than ever, since the daily warm/cold cycle has been extremely favorable (below freezing at night, above during day). The trees all have collection bags or pails right now, and some are connected with hoses to a large tank.
Plus, if anthropogenic carbon dioxide weren’t causing warming, we’d have to ask why not. We know how carbon dioxide interacts with infrared from laboratory experiments, we know how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, we know how much of it humans are producing. The increase in the amount in the atmosphere matches the amount we’re producing, and the greenhouse effect one would expect from that amount of carbon dioxide matches the warming we observe. For the warming to not be anthropogenic, we’d have to assume that something is preventing the carbon dioxide from producing a greenhouse effect, and that at the same time some other completely unrelated natural phenomenon is causing the warming we’re observing.