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Comment by avazhi | Hacker News Reader

The OED defines variance as:

'the fact or quality of being different, divergent, or inconsistent: her light tone was at variance with her sudden trembling.'

That is the first entry for variance; I was not referring to its technical statistical meaning (this should have been obvious).

Recorded history and history are also two very different things - surely this is also obvious. The thermometer was invented in the 1700s. It's entirely possible that the area we now call Phoenix had 100+ days of 100 degree heat multiple times over the past millennium but we wouldn't necessarily know about it.

Even by the most pessimistic projections 'climate change' (to the extent it exists) isn't going to result in catastrophe for the first world, and certainly nothing approaching an extinction event globally.

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> 'climate change' (to the extent it exists) isn't going to result in catastrophe for the first world

I feel like in your mind climate change is +3 degrees on your local thermometer and you skip all the other side effects like literal billions of people migrating north because their environment literally can't support human life anymore

You went from "it doesn't exist" to "maybe it exists but it won't impact me", you took a big step already

Variance in Science is the square of the standard deviation. Since you are talking about a scientific issue, and discussing measurements, and since you claim to have a BSc it is reasonable to expect the word to be used in a technical context.

All history is recorded history BY DEFINITION.

You shouldn't be waving your degree around, you plainly are not a scientist.

As to your understanding of this, consider tossing a coin, and getting heads. For one coin it's a 1/2 chance. For 2 in a row it's 1/4. For 100 the chance is 1/(2^100) which is about 10^-30, a vanishingly small chance.

Now let's take the last 100 years of climate data from phoenix, we can estimate the chance of any day being over 100F from the data, and from that the chance of 100 days straight of over 100F.

Given that less than half of the time it's over 100F in Phoenix, the odds of having 100 days in a row over 100F is less than 10^-30.

This is 1st year science. Your very first data analysis course.

Variance as used in statistics is esoteric and technical and no reasonable person would expect it to be used as a technical or esoteric term unless the surrounding context required it. Given the generality of my original comment and the clear lack of any indication that I was using the term in its statistical sense, you are way off the mark.

Less pedantically, the problem with your example is that you have (really rather hilariously) taken the past century as your reference point, and that’s exactly (no really, EXACTLY) the problem. For all you know 1900-2000 was atypical. The fact that you couldn’t see the irony in what you were thinking before you typed it all out is telling.

Not sure what else to tell you.

You are correct that I’m not a scientist by profession, though - I have a BSc and an LLB from a G8 school. I don’t use my BSc professionally. That fact has no bearing on my ability to use words for their plain meaning, though, or to understand basic scoentific concepts.

Have a good day, mate.

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