From Thomas Young
Michael Payton criticises Michael Le Page’s suggestion that one cannot logically draw conclusions about climate change from a single severe weather event (6 February, p 27).
Payton appears to miss Le Page’s point entirely when he suggests that climate scientists are doing this by using extreme weather events as evidence of climate change. Le Page was not suggesting that one cannot make reasonable inferences about the climate from extreme weather, but rather that it is a statistical fallacy to draw conclusions about the climate from any single weather event or observation (16 January, p 20). After all, weather is not climate, but climate is the average of weather over a long period of time.
The fact that both sceptics and climate scientists are focusing on extreme weather events is irrelevant; the important point is that climate scientists recognise that robust and statistically significant conclusions about climate can only be drawn from the analysis of many weather events over a long period.
Bangor, Maine, US
