Climate: Good Graphs, Bad Explanations

Regular readers know, I love graphs. I use them a lot. I tend to make them “scientifically,” i.e. the kind of graph you’d see in a scientific journal article. Just the fact, ma’am.

The Oz Heat Distribution

We’ve spoken before (as have many before us) of the fact that climate isn’t just about the average, it’s about the whole distribution (the probability distribution if you want to get technical).

We also emphasized that the tails of the distribution — the probabilities for extreme values (very very cold or very very hot, if we’re talking about temperature) can change profoundly when we shift the distribution left or right, without otherwise changing its shape; we illustrated this with July temperature in Moscow:

It set me to wondering, how do things look down under?

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