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Comment by deadeye | Hacker News Reader

The mean is created using 29 years of data. Why those particular 29 years? IDK.

But I tend to dismiss findings like this that don't explain why they chose a very specific dates as the baseline.

Yup. 20% of the population will look at the graph and scream about how we're all doomed and need to start executing people / nuking countries to fix it (seriously, comments from this very thread), 20% of the population will look at the graph and see the hilariously short timeframe, the carefully manipulated axes ranging, and instantly dismiss it as extremist climate doomer insanity and close out of it, and the remaining 60% of the population doesn't care one way or the other.

Yes I was wondering the same. Why is the mean using a different set of years than the total data set? There also seems to be a year where the swing was equally as extreme in the other direction, what year was this? Would be worth mentioning at least in the post.

Based on https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4, 1988 is the year from the dataset with the lowest temperature throughout June and July.

I posted a comment earlier about how 1982-1983 (the start of the data) had a historically severe El Nino, and the comment got shadowbanned. I don't understand why that happens sometimes. Hasn't happened for months, but when it does it's always on innocuous factual comments, it's weird.

I vouched for this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48891223

…as it looks pretty innocuous to me. And more importantly, your other comments aren’t obnoxious. :-) I’d love to know the heuristic that flipped that bit on that one comment.

Question to you, if they looked further back, do you think the variability would increase or decrease. Do you also believe the mean temperature would be lower or higher? Just want to understand your mental model of the climate.

Hmm. "The 1982-1983 El Niño was the strongest and most devastating of the century, perhaps the worst in recorded history."

https://www.whoi.edu/science/B/people/kamaral/1982-1983ElNin...

So maybe the data starts there in order to distort it, or to balance it, or maybe we started recording data properly in that year because El Niño got alarming. Seems relevant somehow anyway.

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