Another “abnormal” baby is born.
Heike M. was born this morning at St. Peters hospital and weighed in at 3850 grams and was 57 cm long. Doctors said that she was heavier and longer than normal. The normal weight for a baby girl in Germany is 3250 grams and 51 cm long. Though bigger than normal babies can occur, their increasing frequency is a sign that size at birth is going up, experts say. If the trends continue, babies will outweigh their mothers by the year 3700.
Also Heike’s hair was more reddish than normal, and not the blond we used to see more often, say 100 years ago. Moreover, Heike’s skin colour was too pale. Though German babies tend to be on the pale side, it is abnormal for a baby to be as pale as Heike. The last baby that was that pale was 2 and half years ago. Doctors report that St. Peters hospital has not seen a normal baby in about 15 years.
Last week Sven was born. He weighed in at 2850 grams and was 49 cm long. Doctors said that although smaller babies are not unusual, and will also occur in the future, Sven’s smaller size, they say, is attributable to “natural variability”. Mothers, they say, will however have to fear oversized abnormal babies in the future.
Maybe some readers by now are wondering what all this is supposed to mean. I’m merely using this baby example to demonstrate the absurdity of taking the statistic of a single random event and attaching too much significance to its deviation from the mean. This unfortunately has become standard practice in weather analysis and climate.
At the end of each month in weather, the statistics get tallied up and compared to a 30-year mean that is arbitrarily chosen. Nowadays if there is a single weather deviation from the mean, we are told that something is wrong and that something significant is happening. But as the above baby example shows, this is a ridiculous practice and we need to get away from it.
The German Weather Service (DWD) just released its statistics for March, 2012 (for Germany) and they tell us that the month was “too warm, too sunny, and too dry”, i.e. that once again the month was not normal. It appears that the German Weather Service, and especially the media, have forgotten that weather is never normal.
Indeed things are getting so bad that the media and desperate warmists are now fretting over half months, or even claiming that single weather events are climatically significant. It seems that deviations are no longer supposed to occur. More often than not we now hear in Germany claims like: “The first half of this month was 4°C warmer than normal”, or “the last 10 days of this month were the wettest in 33 years”, or “the winds in Hamburg in yesterday’s storm were the strongest in 6 years.” The public is supposed to believe that something is wrong with every deviation that occurs in a chaotic system.
We have to return back to reality and remember that with weather, anomaly is normal, and normal is anomaly. Weather anomalies are not climate trends. Anyone claiming otherwise is either a charlatan or a plain fool.
Note: The above baby characteristic statistics are arbitrary and selected only for the purpose of demonstrating a point. I don’t know what an average baby is.
“Indeed things are getting so bad that the media and desperate warmists are now fretting over half months”
Some of them are getting more desperate, but I think most of them are now saying, wait a minute, am I in the wrong club? See this recent observation by Martin Durkin, author of The Great Global Warming Swindle:
http://www.martindurkin.com/short-thoughts/green-skeptics-beginning-end
Some years ago a short study was done about the weather man as far as I remember. He or she is usually the last one in a series of news items on tv. It proved that the public used his performance as a moment of relaxation after all the serious news and before making coffee. It was also found that of all the mentioned weather items only a very small fraction was remembered by the public. Traditionally, the weather man uses sport ‘statistics’, the wettest, warmest, coldest month on record. For the public this is statistics and it keeps their attention fixed for a moment. Apparently, this PR-stuff has become AGW statistics now. Has anyone an idea of what climate science students learn about this subject?
“If the trends continue, babies will outweigh their mothers by the year 3700.”
Classic!!!
“The public is supposed to believe that something is wrong with every deviation that occurs in a chaotic system.
“We have to…remember that with weather, anomaly is normal, and normal is anomaly. Weather anomalies are not climte trends. Anyone claiming otherwise is either a charlatan or a plain fool.
My sentiments, exactly!
Thanks, Pierre!
In Darrel Huff’s “How To Lie With Statistics” he has a cartton of one character saying to another, “Why is it we usually have such unusual weather?” And he wrote that in 1954 when weather actually was normal!
Ha! No normal weather then, no more. Of course, then it was all caused by nuclear bomb tests:
http://www.psygrenz.de/menetekel/witeku/witeku03.htm#19
“[1957] Im gleichen Maße, wie die Atombombenversuche durchgeführt werden, verschlechtert sich das Wetter. Es wurden Beobachtungen gemacht, daß unmittelbar nach H-Bombenexplosionen in anderen Gegenden gewaltige Regengüsse folgten. Orkane und Taifune mit riesigen Überschwemmungen sind ebenfalls unmittelbar danach aufgetreten. Hat diese abnorme Wetterlage etwas mit den H-Bomben zu tun? […] Die Erdatmosphäre ist durch das unverantwortliche, verbrecherische Treiben mit Atomspaltungsversuchen vollkommen verseucht. Besonders die H-Bombenexplosionen sind die Ursache für das abnorme Wetter […] Alles wird in Unordnung gebracht. Die Meteorologen können sich das nicht erklären. Doch die Tatsachen lassen sich nicht wegleugnen.”
(The weather is getting worse in the same degree that nuclear explosions are carried out. It has been observed that following immediately after H-bomb tests there have been tremendous rainfalls in other regions. Storms and typhoons with immense inundations also occured at once. Has this abnormal weather anything to do with the H-bombs? … The atmosphere as been completely poisoned by this irresponsible, criminal messing with atom splitting. The H-bombs especially are the cause of this abnormal weather…everything is thrown into a turmoil. The meteorologists cannot explain it, but the facts cannot be denied.)
(Actually, these are – or purport to be – protocols of automatic, “mediumistic” writing. It’s always surprising how the ectoplasmic ghosts parrot exactly the concerns trumpeted in the media a few years before. That goes back to the dawn of spiritualism in 1830-50, so it can’t be a case of radio waves poisoning the spirits…)
You might enjoy this. Three cranks discussing the change of times, the sorrows and the hopes of the transition (death). Currently they seem to regurgitate the class warfare meme/materialism critique and the 2012/Mayan end of times stuff. Significantly ABSENT is global warming. So even the cranks dropped the ball on that one…
“Dagmar Neubronner, Jo Conrad und Detlef Schönenberg unterhalten sich über den Wandel der Zeiten, die Sorgen und die Hoffnungen des Übergangs.”
Beginn der neuen Zeit 2012.bewusst- tv 3.11.2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVLmUpxcd4Q&feature=related
German March weather “too warm,too sunny, too dry” i would think all germans were having the time of thier lives instead of shivverring in thier homes!
Meanwhile in Poland…
http://kontakt24.tvn.pl/temat,z-palmami-przez-snieg-zart-na-1-kwietnia,40146.html?categoryId=2
German Umweltbundesamt jubilates – Germany achieves nonsensical goal earlier than expected – shutdown of steelworks, aluminum and copper affineries leads to 1 % reduction in CO2 emissions.
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/positive-bilanz-des-bundesumweltamtes-deutsche-industrie-vermindert-kohlendioxid-ausstoss-1.1324744?google_editors_picks=true
Even better: economic collapse of Eurozone leads to overall reduction of 2.4 %
In other news, EU unemployment record high at 10.9%.
Green agenda works: More unemployment leads to less CO2 emissions, lower prosperity, earlier deaths, more human suffering, less plant food, and a general return to the Dark Ages.
Could I have a Green Troll now come here and comment how great all of this is?
Note the photo on the Sueddeutsche article: 7 cooling towers spewing H20 with the line: “Die deutsche Industrie stieß 2011 weniger Kohlendioxid aus als 2010” – “German industry emitted less CO2 in 2010″…
How do you know a journalist doesn’t understand a theme? He writes about it.
DirkH,
If a German journalist don’t know, or wish to know, the difference between a chimney and a cooling tower, what hope is there for the future of civilization?
Maybe candle making is a career choice we should encourage or kids to follow.
🙂 Well it’s not like journalists of the Sueddeutsche help in building the future anyway. Never forget Sturgeon’s Law: 95% of everything is crap – and this has always been true for journalism as well.
In other words, there are, as always, a few very good journalists; the Sueddeutsche has none of them, but that is their problem.
Somebody should ask the DWD which years had “normal weather” throughout the year.