Salience bias
There’s been a lot of news recently about cold weather and snow in parts of the far Northern hemisphere that have people living in them, especially English-speaking people. As has typically happened with newsworthy cold snaps in recent years, this is balanced by unseasonably warm weather in parts of the far North that don’t have many people living in them.
There are good reasons why the TV news doesn’t have much coverage of unseasonably warm weather in northern Greenland and the Arctic icecap. For a start, the local broadcasting infrastructure sucks. It’s still important to remember that we only hear about weather in a fairly small fraction of the world.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
The cold snaps in parts of the NH that have people living in them are a story due to the number of people dying. An extra 2,000 UK deaths for the first two weeks of March compared to previous five years time period is an interesting stat.
11 years ago
Yes, exactly.
There really are good reasons why the cold snaps are news. That’s my point, but those reasons are exactly why the news is unreliable as background information about temperature.
11 years ago