::WARNING:: I’m just thinking out loud here. It may provide food for thought, and it may also be completely useless.
The first measurement I hate is one we see all too often. Fortunately most of us are smart enough to recognize the crap on the spot. I’m referring to vehicles which get great miles per gallon… of gasoline. This usually pops up with people who want to plug in their hybrids. Sure they get 100 miles per gallon of gas, but they’re probably using 2 gallons of gasoline equivalent in the form of burning coal. If we want to be efficient, we have to look at the whole system.
Of course part of the goal of efficiency is to reduce the use of fossil fuels in an attempt to control the climate.
Two words, “rain dance.”
Ok the rain dance isn’t really about anything, I just felt like saying it.
But I do have to wonder about average global temperature and stuff like that. Taking a mountain of data and boiling it down to just one value is a effort that requires huge assumptions and no one should be comfortable relying on a single metric for such a complex system.
Now, I don’t know how they calculate such things exactly. But I do know what when the average temperature for a given day for a given location is taken, they find the average of the high and low temperatures for the day. Of course that’s not the average at all. It may be close, but there’s room to be way off.
For example, let’s say we have a group of 24 people. 23 of the 24 people have no income. The 24th person is someone like Bill Gates who, let’s say, makes 2.4 billion dollars a year. by the weather method, the average income of the group would be 1.2 billion dollars per year. But really the mean is a much lower but still impressive 100 million per year.
I wonder what steps climatologists take to correct for that. Do they use a more accurate average that uses more data points per day? Do they use “average” temperatures? High temperatures?
But like I said, I’m just thinking out loud.
