Shifting Bell Curves revisited
It's been a few years (close to four) since I last wrote a post. Yes, I'm still alive. Life just...got complicated for a bit. While much has been happening, it seems that outright climate change denial is finally dying, probably because we're already seeing it happen before our very eyes. In this post, I'm revisiting the Shifting Bell Curves I first wrote about in 2013. Here we go. One of the tenants of climate change is that it changes the frequency and probability of climate-related events. Here I use NCDC data broken into decades to show how the frequency of monthly global mean temperatures changed over time. We're all familiar with time series plots of temperature data such as the one below showing that global mean temperatures have risen by an average of 0.179ºC per decade (95% confidence interval: 0.171 to 0.188ºC) since 1970. However, this way, while still informative, doesn't allow the reader to really grasp just how much the distribution of monthly me...