New Year's Predictions Thread (2011)

Kevin

As we did last year, use this thread to make predictions for the next year and next decade, with probabilities attached when practical.

Happy New Year, Less Wrong!

As we did last year, use this thread to make predictions for the next year and next decade, with probabilities attached when practical.

Happy New Year, Less Wrong!

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%.

6wedrifid15y

Not so. It is not mathematics itself that assumes a neat random distribution. Your assertion is about climate science.

4Skatche15y

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.

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New Year's Predictions Thread (2011)

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New Year's Predictions Thread (2011)

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