Earth just had its hottest year on record — climate change is to blame

submitted by ActuallyNot from nature.com

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]ActuallyNot[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Reliable records don't go back very far into Earth's history

There's proxies that give a decent local temperature. Estimates converge to within a degree.

and modern temperatures are taken from incredibly scientific locations such as London's Heathrow Airport, so I take this claim with a pinch of salt.

Local effects that impact a single measuring station are detected by difference in trend from nearby stations. If they are anomalous, then they don't contribute to the trend for that grid.

And measurements from satellites confirm that the ground-based measurements are not biased: https://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1979/plot/rss/offset:0.270847

[–]cunninglingus 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Excellent links

[–]ActuallyNot[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Thanks!

Wood for trees is a good resource for mucking about with different temperature estimates. Note that UAH has a lower warming trend than the others, probably attributable in part to motivated reasoning by Christie and Spenser.

But RSS and UAH are both satellite MSU derived temperatures.