Climate
It's gettin hotter, that's for sure
Author: Tater
Gumfries
Abstract: What with all this talk of global warming and global cooling, we thought it's about time someone actually figured out which one it is. We looked at the thermometer for more than a whole week, and wrote down the temperatures, and it looks like things is warming up.
Indroduction: They's a lot of theories about whether it's gettting warmer or colder. I guess that's pretty much up to the seasons, and what with Summer comin up, it seems like it ought to get warmer. Now, they is some folks, mostly on the intertubes who say that it is actually gettin colder, and it was for a while when Winter was comin last year. In order to clear things up, Tater and his gals set them up an experiment.
Method: We set out a thermometer on the back porch, close to a lot of the weather where all the warmin and coolin ought to be. Three times a day for more than a week we took a good careful look at that sucker, and wrote down the temperature. Had to give it a couple good shakes every once in a while cause the dang thing got a little bubble in it so's you couldn't tell for sure. When we was done, we took a look at them numbers, which was wrote kinda sloppy, and decided we needed to fix them up some. Bayleen has a piece of paper with little squares drawed all over it, and said we ought to write them numbers down on that to make em line up nice. Janine had the best writin, so she was the one who wrote it down, and if this here paper is wrong, maybe it's her fault. Cause the whole thing was Tater's idea, and a pretty good one at that, so maybe Janine made a mistake, but even if she did, the writin looks good. It still weren't too easy to see what was goin on, even though the little squares paper made the numbers line up nice.
Then Marlene got the idea of drawin little dots in a row, one square at a time from left to right, and puttin some dots for the temperature up the same number of little squares high as the numbers was big. That way, it sort of looked like the mountains when you connected the dots, but it weren't no mountains -- it was a picture of the temperature! Tater thinks this might be a new kinda way of lookin at numbers, but he don't know for sure. Man, that thing looked nice, and you could follow the little line up and down and get a good idea of how things was goin.
Well, sir, we found out there was somethin goin on all right. Them three little dots for every day, the first one was kinda low, then the second one was higher, and the third was lower again, and this happened every day! Not only that, them three little dots went higher and higher in a bunch! At the end of the week, the dots was almost off the top of the paper.
We pondered on this a spell, and come to think that maybe we could draw a kinda straight line that was pretty close to all the dots, but didn't have to get all jagged goin through all of them. That way, the line went through the least number of squares on that paper, and didn't use up so much ink or make Tater mad when he missed a couple and had to start over. Tater calls this the "least squares" method.
When we did this, it come out clean as a whistle, and you could tell for sure that the temperature was gettin higher and higher.
Conclusion: It's gettin hotter, yessiree.
Future work: We expect that if we did the same thing next week, it might get hotter too, but it's time to put out the tomaters and the peppers, so we ain't got the time.