Comments on: The Polar Bear Problem https://www.isegoria.net/2011/09/the-polar-bear-problem/ From the ancient Greek for equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts, large and small Wed, 15 Jul 2026 20:16:40 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1 By: Alrenous https://www.isegoria.net/2011/09/the-polar-bear-problem/comment-page-1/#comment-340676 Alrenous Sat, 10 Sep 2011 19:17:59 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=26216#comment-340676 I found out that climate records are meaningless. Weather is a forced oscillator, which follows the Cauchy-Lorentz distribution. The Cauchy distribution has no mean, basically because it has fat tails. So fat that the odds of very large values drops less fast than the values grow.

Two consequences.

  1. The more dramatic a weather record is, the less it tells you about the distribution.
  2. As measurement continues, the odds of seeing a new record grow faster than linearly, which means that all weather records are likely to be recent. (If the previous record was a ten-year high, it will generally be beaten in less than ten years, and so on.)
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