The oldest veterans and the hottest summers

Some things surprise us, because we think about the wrong things most of the time. Records are like this - we tend to remember the longest, highest, fastest, oldest in absolute value. We tend not to see the averages.

I stumbled across the List of Last Surviving War Veterans, tracking various wars back to the wars of Henry VIII (!). What jumps out is just how old some of these veterans were even back in the days when most people died young (compared to today):

• Jones Morgan, veteran of the Spanish-American War, died in 1993 at the age of 111.
• Albert Woolson, veteran of the War Between the States, died in 1956 at the age of 111.
• Col. R.E.B. Crompton, veteran of the Crimean War, died in 1940 at the age of 95.
• Owen Thomas Edgar, veteran of the Mexican War, died in 1929 at the age of 98.
• Hiram Cronk, veteran of the War of 1812, died in 1905 at the age of 105.
• Jean Adrin, veteran of Napoleon's wars, died in 1902 at the age of 105.
• Lemuel Cook, veteran of the Revolutionary War, died in 1866 at the age of 107.
• William Hiseland, veteran of the English Civil War, died in 1732 at the age of 112. He married his fourth wife when he was 100, and outlived her.
  

I was struck by just how old these men were, surviving to ages that would be considered very elderly even today. For example, here are the last three surviving World War I veterans:

• Claude Stanley Choules (Britain/Australia), born 1901 (age 109)
• Florence Green (Britain), born 1901
• Frank Buckles (USA), born 1901
  

The surprise, of course, is that the record for absolute longest age is not increasing much at all. But this fact hides the (more important) fact that the average age is increasing, and has increased dramatically over the last four centuries. But what we immediately notice, and what sticks in our minds - and therefore what we see in the newspaper - is the less important number.

This cuts both ways, in a very interesting manner. We've been hearing for a decade that ZOMG the planet is warming and it's the hottest evah and we're all going to die!!!1!!one!!

But is it? Sure, you hear about record high temperatures reported in the newspaper, always attached to a ZOMG Thermageddon story line. But do these records tell us that? How could we tell?

We have thermometer readings of some quality going back perhaps 120 to 140 years. During that time, we can go back and look at how many records were set each year in particular geographies. For example, Colorado:

Since CO2 has already increased by 110 ppm, any effects of increasing atmospheric carbon should be noticeable by now. Here’s a chart of the highest temperature recorded in the state of Colorado for each year since 1888.

The average hasn't changed really at all since the 1880s. Now if the planet were seriously warming, wouldn't you expect to see the number of weather stations reporting record highs to be increasing? That's some righteous Global Warming right there, that increases average temperatures but not record temperatures. Makes you wonder if the average is increasing, if the record isn't - after all, average age is increasing because of the advance of science and the increasing wealth (comparing to historic times) of even the poor today. This is clearly very different from the proposed Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis.

So numbers are interesting things. They tell you things that you know, and they tell you things that you don't know. Most importantly, they tell you that some things that you "know" are wrong.