Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
It's still funny. Because there is nothing at all to ensure that those sources are accurate. I have been a high school teacher and a university professor. I can tell you that just because a random person cites a source, does not in any way mean it is accurate. Generally speaking, students who are conscientious and knowledgeable about their subject will cite properly, but students who are not will just make things up. The kind of people who use Wikipedia are often people who are careless and not careful scholars at all (otherwise they wouldn't use Wikipedia). If you actually wanted to be accurate, cite the course yourself directly (which should mean you actually read it - not the Wikipedia page, which is the same as reading someone's blog in terms of being factual).
Or don't cite a source, because you're on City-Data and no one requires you to be a scholar. You ca say anything you want, and just saying it is enough.
But it is just hypocritical and funny to write on an anything-goes place like City-Data and then try to gain credibility for what you're saying by citing Wikipedia, another anything-goes online website. You might as well say "8 out of 10 dogs in my neighborhood agree." That's how much information on Wikipedia is worth.
Just saying. I see this all the time, and the more people see others post this stuff, the more they forget that Wikipedia is by definition a public forum with no actual regulation before information is posted from random user to public online page. It is laughable that half the pages have disclaimers that information or citations "may be incomplete or inaccurate" but the pages are still up anyway. You can't publish a scholarly book or article like that, you have to actually cite all complete sources, and then somebody vets the citations to be sure all are exactly accurate and the conclusions you're drawing by using them are justifiable. Wikipedia just lets you sign in and post, and it's not even hacking to change or add information that is totally fictional and just included for the purposes of amusement.
People have discredited Wikipedia over and over again. As an example, a student who was writing a paper about the limitations of Wikipedia posted a fictional entry for himself, stating that he was the mayor of a town in China. Four years later, if you type in his name, or if you do a subject search on Wikipedia for mayors of towns in China, you will still find this fictional entry. If you have ever watched the Daily Show, they encourage users to change Wikipedia pages all the time just for entertainment. Wikipedia is a joke. And a well-known joke. Don't support your words with a source that people openly laugh at if you want to be taken seriously, is all I'm saying. It is enough to just speak from your own experience. Or actually read a book or scholarly article if you want to sound smart.
Without getting into the argument, which has been dragged to death in multiple threads over the course of years, the reason the whole "Miami is tropical" argument is constantly disputed is because it depends on what definition of the word "tropical" you are using. There are multiple recognized definitions of "tropical" (No, resist the immediate urge to look on Wikipedia for those definitions!), and one of them is describing things that fall within the boundaries of latitude between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn lines surrounding the Equator. Miami obviously is not included therein. But there are other definitions of the word "tropical" that can legitimately be used. However, most of Miami-Dade is technically subtropical because it has the ability to reach freezing temperatures even once a year (and because it is adjacent to the Tropic latitude zones, not in them). The ability to grow some tropical (but not ultratropical) plants does not change that fact. Monroe County, on the other hand, has never reached freezing. But it has far less rainfall than Miami-Dade, so it is not necessarily more "tropical" even though you can grow ultratropics here. The fact is, true ultratropical plants need intervention by humans to survive their entire lifespan in either county, with supplemental heat, or water, and none of them just grow here naturally.
So your OP made me laugh because you state Miami is classified as a tropical climate as if it is a fact, but if you ask any environmental scientists who work in Miami, they will disagree with you. They refer to most of it as subtropical. But believe whatever you want. You're the sort of person who reads Wikipedia and thinks it's fact anyway, so anything can be a "fact" if you just believe it hard enough, right? For scholars "facts" and "made-up junk" are two different things. For Wikipedia, they're all one and the same.
exactly nothing you find on the internet or book you buy at a book store is fact or could be true. In College or University they have books,papers and articles improve for the school use only. And every thing is read and reread by the academics.
If some web site,book,doctor, scientist or Joe say it is x number miles to the moon that could be false. A textbook improve for classroom is only proper cite where academics review of such claim.
Given the warm year-round climate, and plentiful rainfall (over 60 inches), it is, essentially, a tropical rainforest. Yet, school text-books never make not of this ecological region; they are far too broad, going as far as to place the entire Eastern US as "Temperate Deciduous Forest."
How long has Florida been under this dry spell?
This is closer when people think if true tropical rainforest.
I admit I don't know the first thing about tropical vs tropical subtropical environments, so couldn't say whether south Florida is one or the other. I can't claim any expertise about rainforests either, but there is something that rings a bell in the back of my head from a Botany course I had to take as a Biology major in college eons ago that makes me think, as others have said, that
the rainfall pattern (or lack of rain perhaps), and the lack of deep soil ( ie, the thin layers on top of solid coral rock) disqualifies S. Fl as a true rainforest. I might be wrong, but that is my take on it.
But the bloviating on about how Wikipedia cannot be a valid source of information was pretty funny, IMO. Everyone knows how the information on the site is gathered, that the information can be altered by those inclined to do so, on many Wikipedia sites there are even disclaimers at the top of the page to that effect to warn an unsuspecting reader about possibly suspect information.
But there ARE sites on Wikipedia ( and its offshoots in any number of specific areas) where the information is accurate, submitted by contributors with expertise in the given area, and documented by linked references to articles in professional journals and other peer-reviewed sources. I know when I have searched for information in the medical science and related fields, I have sometimes found the information in the Wikipedia sources to provide better summaries, explanations, or overall information on a given topic than the journal articles or online textbooks which I also reviewed in my searches. Kind of surrprised me but there it was.
That being said, if I were seriously looking for information on a given topic, I would not limit my search to Wikipedia, but I might use it as a starting point-if for no other reason than to get more of a general perspective on the topic and to access some of those references linked at the end.
IMO, dismissing Wikipedia completely as a potential source of information, and belittling an individual for quoting it smacks of pseudo-intellectual snobbery.
As a meteorologist, I find these debates interesting (though whether or not Miami is tropical is not really important to most people). If you want to get technical, Miami is considered a tropical climate by the Koppen system. However, I think people who take part in this discourse often forget that the climate within a climate zone is not uniform. You could probably divide all of these into sub categories. I live in Houston which is safely subtropical. Most people don't have a problem calling Houston subtropical because the climate is much like a tropical location for most of the year. Hell, it's currently November 11th and it was 80 degrees with dew points in the 70s this morning! We also have a variety of tropical like plants here that give it a semi tropical feel. But winter reminds us that we are definitely not tropical. But what about places in Virginia and the mid-Atlantic that are also technically subtropical? Should we debate as to whether or not they should be subtropical like the debate we are having about Miami? It does seem odd that Houston (which on average only gets a handful of freezes) is in the same climate zone as places that average winter lows in the 20s with about 25 inches of seasonal snowfall. We are also in the same climate zones as locations that go several years without freezes and have landscapes not too terribly dissimilar to Miami.
I don't take issue with Miami being a type of tropical climate. Could we call it the arctic of the tropics? Haha Sure why not. To someone who lives in Puerto Rico, Miami winters are downright cool. But I think there is climate diversity within the tropical climate region. Perhaps there should be a discussion about sub-categories to the Koppen system.
As a meteorologist, I find these debates interesting (though whether or not Miami is tropical is not really important to most people). If you want to get technical, Miami is considered a tropical climate by the Koppen system. However, I think people who take part in this discourse often forget that the climate within a climate zone is not uniform. You could probably divide all of these into sub categories. I live in Houston which is safely subtropical. Most people don't have a problem calling Houston subtropical because the climate is much like a tropical location for most of the year. Hell, it's currently November 11th and it was 80 degrees with dew points in the 70s this morning! We also have a variety of tropical like plants here that give it a semi tropical feel. But winter reminds us that we are definitely not tropical. But what about places in Virginia and the mid-Atlantic that are also technically subtropical? Should we debate as to whether or not they should be subtropical like the debate we are having about Miami? It does seem odd that Houston (which on average only gets a handful of freezes) is in the same climate zone as places that average winter lows in the 20s with about 25 inches of seasonal snowfall. We are also in the same climate zones as locations that go several years without freezes and have landscapes not too terribly dissimilar to Miami.
I don't take issue with Miami being a type of tropical climate. Could we call it the arctic of the tropics? Haha Sure why not. To someone who lives in Puerto Rico, Miami winters are downright cool. But I think there is climate diversity within the tropical climate region. Perhaps there should be a discussion about sub-categories to the Koppen system.
Cam
Yea, Koppen has Miami as a Monsoon Tropical Climate
As a meteorologist, I find these debates interesting (though whether or not Miami is tropical is not really important to most people). If you want to get technical, Miami is considered a tropical climate by the Koppen system. However, I think people who take part in this discourse often forget that the climate within a climate zone is not uniform. You could probably divide all of these into sub categories. I live in Houston which is safely subtropical. Most people don't have a problem calling Houston subtropical because the climate is much like a tropical location for most of the year. Hell, it's currently November 11th and it was 80 degrees with dew points in the 70s this morning! We also have a variety of tropical like plants here that give it a semi tropical feel. But winter reminds us that we are definitely not tropical. But what about places in Virginia and the mid-Atlantic that are also technically subtropical? Should we debate as to whether or not they should be subtropical like the debate we are having about Miami? It does seem odd that Houston (which on average only gets a handful of freezes) is in the same climate zone as places that average winter lows in the 20s with about 25 inches of seasonal snowfall. We are also in the same climate zones as locations that go several years without freezes and have landscapes not too terribly dissimilar to Miami.
I don't take issue with Miami being a type of tropical climate. Could we call it the arctic of the tropics? Haha Sure why not. To someone who lives in Puerto Rico, Miami winters are downright cool. But I think there is climate diversity within the tropical climate region. Perhaps there should be a discussion about sub-categories to the Koppen system.
Cam
Yea Koppen has Miami classified as a Monsoon Tropical Climate
As a meteorologist, I find these debates interesting (though whether or not Miami is tropical is not really important to most people). If you want to get technical, Miami is considered a tropical climate by the Koppen system. However, I think people who take part in this discourse often forget that the climate within a climate zone is not uniform. You could probably divide all of these into sub categories. I live in Houston which is safely subtropical. Most people don't have a problem calling Houston subtropical because the climate is much like a tropical location for most of the year. Hell, it's currently November 11th and it was 80 degrees with dew points in the 70s this morning! We also have a variety of tropical like plants here that give it a semi tropical feel. But winter reminds us that we are definitely not tropical. But what about places in Virginia and the mid-Atlantic that are also technically subtropical? Should we debate as to whether or not they should be subtropical like the debate we are having about Miami? It does seem odd that Houston (which on average only gets a handful of freezes) is in the same climate zone as places that average winter lows in the 20s with about 25 inches of seasonal snowfall. We are also in the same climate zones as locations that go several years without freezes and have landscapes not too terribly dissimilar to Miami.
I don't take issue with Miami being a type of tropical climate. Could we call it the arctic of the tropics? Haha Sure why not. To someone who lives in Puerto Rico, Miami winters are downright cool. But I think there is climate diversity within the tropical climate region. Perhaps there should be a discussion about sub-categories to the Koppen system.
Cam
Finally! A sensible post on this topic! I agree with you 100%. It's a peripheral tropical city (Miami is), located in the subtropics but with a tropical climate, even if we get the occasional cold front. Yet you have these people that will swear up and down about it being subtropical and absolutely refuse to entertain any other notion. BUT if you bring up what you said, about the subtropics running up to PHL/NYC, then they say nothing. Because of course, with all the snow and barren trees in the winter Miami and Philadelphia are naturally are in the same climate category
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
