zlacker

>>Brajes+(OP)
I have never figured out how average global temperatures can be such a sure thing. Where I live (rural US) temperature forecasts for "right now" are always off, sometimes by three or four degrees. Currently the NWS says it's 98dF out, while my own thermometer reads 79dF, almost 20 degrees off!

I imagine this inaccuracy is because the nearest stations are over four hours away. I also imagine four hours to the nearest station is common for a large portion of the globe. I suspect this difference in forecasted temperature and the actual temperature is increasingly large the further back you go in time.

It seems like there is a lot of noise and dirty data to be so confident about a couple degree increase.

>>pard68+Qo
Imagine a huge vat of water, you add some blue food coloring. it swirls around in there, predicting how blue any spot in the vat will be is very hard. predicting the total amount of blue is very easy.

the confidence on global temperature increase is quite high, you can arrive at the same trend that the serious efforts do with a random selection of a couple of hundred stations and without any corrections. I have done this in the past using raw noaa data.

That was sort of my “aha” moment