Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Boxes
- 1 INTRODUCTION
- 2 RADIATION AND THE EARTH'S ENERGY BALANCE
- 3 THE ELEMENTS OF THE CLIMATE
- 4 EVIDENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
- 5 CONSEQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE
- 6 THE MEASUREMENT OF CLIMATIC CHANGE
- 7 STATISTICS, SIGNIFICANCE AND CYCLES
- 8 THE CAUSES OF CLIMATIC CHANGE
- 9 MODELLING THE CLIMATE
- 10 PREDICTING CLIMATE CHANGE
- Bibliography
- Glossary
- Index
7 - STATISTICS, SIGNIFICANCE AND CYCLES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Boxes
- 1 INTRODUCTION
- 2 RADIATION AND THE EARTH'S ENERGY BALANCE
- 3 THE ELEMENTS OF THE CLIMATE
- 4 EVIDENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
- 5 CONSEQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE
- 6 THE MEASUREMENT OF CLIMATIC CHANGE
- 7 STATISTICS, SIGNIFICANCE AND CYCLES
- 8 THE CAUSES OF CLIMATIC CHANGE
- 9 MODELLING THE CLIMATE
- 10 PREDICTING CLIMATE CHANGE
- Bibliography
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
All is flux, nothing stays still
Heraclitus c.540–c.480 BCSqueezing useful information out of the available data is the essence of unravelling the causes of climate variability and climate change. The challenge is to exploit statistical techniques and tease out significant cycles, shifts or trends in the climate from the sea of noise which washes over all aspects of this subject. This requires a disciplined approach to avoid falling into the trap of attributing too much to what is nothing more than noise because, the one thing that is certain, is that every aspect of the climate fluctuates on every timescale. So what really matters is to define specific meaning to the terms introduced in Chapter 1 (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2) in order to substantiate any conclusions reached about past changes and to provide a benchmark for making predictions about the future.
This process of analysis is not just a matter of identifying significant changes in the climate (e.g. trends, cycles or sudden shifts) but also involves interpreting the properties of the associated variability. The latter can occur on every timescale within the period covered by the observations. The only way to conduct this analysis is to consider the statistical techniques designed to get the best out of noisy data. This involves a wide range of complicated mathematical techniques. These will not be discussed here. Instead we will concentrate on three practical matters.
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- Climate ChangeA Multidisciplinary Approach, pp. 175 - 200Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001