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uninverted comments on New Year's Predictions Thread (2011) - Less Wrong
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It's not climate science, it's mathematics. The probability of a specific number being the highest in a sequence goes down rapidly as the number of items increases. And it's not like the temperature is doubling every year, either.
That's only true for a stationary series, which temperature isn't. For a random walk series you can have a 50% chance of each new observation being the highest ever in the series. For a trended series it can be higher than 50%.
Every year of the last ten years is among the top 15 warmest years on record. The other years are '00 '99, 98', '97 and '95. It seems very likely 2011 will be in the top 10, there is of course variation but you'd be crazy to expect a normal distribution. "Historically hot summer" is somewhat ambiguous but I'd say >.5 2011 is a top 5 warmest year (I don't have summer data- we might presume more variability there). ~10% for the hottest year on record doesn't sound crazy to me.
Okay, forget everything I just said; that probability does seem reasonable after seeing that data.
Not so. It is not mathematics itself that assumes a neat random distribution. Your assertion is about climate science.
I was simply going by remembered frequencies: every year since I started paying attention I've heard, at least once, something of the form "This year/season/month/day was (one of) the hottest on record in Ontario/Canada/America/the world." I therefore take the probability that at least one of these things happening to be quite high, and so the probability of specifically the U.S. having specifically a "historically hot" summer, although small, is by no means negligible. 10% is a reasonable rough estimate.
Did you know in certain parts of Europe, this winter was the first winter since 1945 where it has snowed for more than (some number) days before (some date) ?
Media like records, so they will report quantities that attain a record value.
That's true, but irrelevant. The fact that they're being reported doesn't change the fact that record values are, indeed, being attained.
It depends on how natural the records in question are. If there are 100 different records to be broken, you expect every year to break one and you should never be surprised when someone reports on it.
If you are choosing random properties and finding them to be extremal with reasonable probability, then you are getting a totally different sort of data.
This is also true but irrelevant. Skatche wasn't making predictions about whether he would be surprised by reports of records being broken. Just a specific prediction about weather.