A small experiment with the Bureau of Met’s record of mean temperature anomalies for Victoria using Hadley Wickham’s ‘ggplot’ library for R. There are 696 observations of monthly means between 1950 and 2008. The Bureau provides ‘anomalies’ from the monthly 1961–1990 means. How are these anomalies distributed? Are they skewed toward the upper ‘tail’ of the distribution, pointing to an alarming degree of warming in Victoria?
Well, there’s a smidge greater length in the upper tail. But otherwise, looks like a factory-standard normal distribution to me.
