How Do You Determine Whether The Earth Is Warming Up? Tuesday,
October 16, 3:30PM – 5PM Juan M. Restrepo How does one determine
whether the high summer temperatures in Moscow of a few years
ago was an extreme climatic fluctuation or the result of a
systematic global warming trend? How does one perform an
analysis of the causes of this summer's high temperatures in the
US, if climate variability is poorly constrained? It is only
under exceptional circumstances that one can determine whether a
climate signal belongs to a particular statistical distribution.
In fact, climate signals are rarely "statistical;" there is
usually no way to obtain enough field data to produce a trend or
tendency, based upon data alone. There are other challenges to
obtaining a trend: inherent multi-scale manifestations,
nonlinearities, history. In fact, the whole science of climate
variability and many non-equilibrium physics outcomes, depend
critically on how one determines an underlying trend. We propose
a trend or tendency methodol