Rather than continue to shrug my shoulders and pass on having an opinion as to whether the ice caps are melting, etc.
, I decided to do some research on the matter.
At the online national weather site you may enter any zip code to access the weather for today, next week, or in past days.
So I entered the zip code (13433) for my home town, the small hamlet of Port Leyden, NY, located upstate at the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, some 45 miles north of Utica, on Route 12.
The sequence to obtain weather data I used for this research goes...
weather, records and averages, and finally you visit the page called: "Daily recorded averages.
" Here you may click on any month of the year where you will find the record high and the record low temperature for every day of that month, along with the year the high and the year the low was recorded.
It was at this point that I decided to run a standard deviation calculation on the distance in years from 2011 to the year of each high and each low, to determine whether highs are nearer, overall, to our present year, than are the lows, which would indicate a warming trend; or whether record-setting lows are generally closer to the present time, indicating a cooling trend.
Calculating averages using standard deviation is a simple matter of squaring the distance, such as 1981 equals a distance of 30 from 2011; finding the sum of the squares, then dividing by the number of cases, before hitting the square root button on your calculator, and there you have it.
For example, let's say for the first five days of a sample month, in the record high category, the record highs were set in 1985 on the 1st, 1990 on the 2nd, 1950 on the 3rd, 2002 on the 4th, and 1996 on the 5th of the month.
The respective distances from 2011 become: 26, 21, 61, 9, and 15.
We square these distance figures and come up with: 676 + 441 + 3721 + 81 + 225, which add up to a total of 5144.
We then divide 5144 by the five cases = 1028.
8.
The square root of 1028.
8 = 32.
07 which is our standard deviation answer and which is more indicative a figure than the arithmetic mean answer to this exercise which is 26.
4.
Proceeding in the above manner in monthly record high and low segments, here is how the survey panned out for standard deviation findings, with the lower, and therefore nearer number for each month being indicated by an asterisk...
High...
Low January 38.
99...
27.
92* February 32.
31*...
43.
55 March 33.
41*...
40.
12 April 31.
56*...
37.
82 May 34.
78*...
44.
82 June 38.
86*...
40.
25 July 38.
71*...
41.
78 August 39.
41*...
50.
41 Sept.
45.
47...
43.
72* Oct.
48.
17...
39.
64* Nov.
41.
59*...
45.
08 Dec.
38.
31...
33.
03* The standard deviation for the 12 months comprising the high column is 38.
765; and for the entire low column it is 41.
07, meaning that, overall, record high temperatures are about 2.
5 years nearer to our present time, than are record lows.
This, combined with the fact that eight of the 12 months are trending warmer lends credibility to statements and claims that our planet is warming up.
Are the findings for Port Leyden typical or atypical? My guess is that if you run the same math exercise for your own home town there will not be much deviation from the above findings.