What about variability?
The much more dramatic effect of global warming may be an increase in variability of weather - things get more extreme. I'd love to see a study looking at trends in temperature variance, for example. Global warming adds heat energy to the complex system of earth's weather and climate; much like increasing how hard you shake a bowl half-full of water, adding this energy is going to cause things to move a lot more - in the case of the earth's atmosphere, that means more extreme weather. Some of that will be hotter, some of it will be colder, some wetter, some drier. Looking at the overall mean temperature is looking for a subtle indicator of the underlying increase in heat energy. How has the number of hurricanes changed? The number of days more than two standard deviations away from normal temperature? The number of precipitation records broken? I'm sure this information exists somewhere, but I haven't come across it...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
