Mean Means (part 1)

Reaching for our inner climatological geek

In the field of climate science one thing is more certain than political interference and lapdog journalists and that is climate variability. Things are consistently going up and down in value whether by hour, day, week, month, year, decade or century. Very little stands still regardless of whether we are measuring rainfall, atmospheric pressure, humidity, particulates, cloud cover, cosmic ray flux, ocean pH, hours of sunshine, sea surface temperature, wind speed, sea level or the temperature of airfield tarmac. Jiggling about is what the globe does best.

Humans are not very good at solving problems in n-dimensional covariance space so we try to simplify matters by putting a straight line through data, by adjusting measurements that don’t fit the narrative, by calling black the new orange or by reaching for a measure of central tendency such as the arithmetical mean (a.k.a. average) or median that squashes all that hairy variability into a convenient carrier of information.

We can then…