What Do The Snowfall Records At Mt. Rainier Tell Us?
When I posted a graph showing total snowfall at Mt. Rainier from 1921 to the present, I got a lot of guesses as to why I was posting the graph. Almost all of the guessers thought that I posted it in order to make an argument on one side of the great climate change debate. They were wrong. The best guess was that I posted the graph to show a trend. And, in fact, there is a trend, which you can see estimated in the dashed line in the plot. If you believe the line, then you would say that the total snowfall at Rainier has been increasing by a little more than 2 inches a year since 1921. (The equation was estimated with a simple linear model, in which the total snowfall(y) is a linear function of the year(x). Those who like to do mindless extrapolation will notice that the average snowfall at Paradise will be close to 1,000 inches in 150 years — and that it was minus 3500 inches in 1 AD. Mindless extrapolations can be entertaining.) Having shown you that estimated trend, I will now say tha
