“Regardless, all NCDC temperature proclamations must be taken with a large grain of salt. Here’s why.”
“…Until the use of thermocouple temperature indicators became common in the U.S. climate network, temperatures were determined with mercury thermometers that are, at best, only accurate within 0.9 degree Fahrenheit…” [Washington Times]
Howdy gamecock
On top of the misleading “precision” of the reports, there’s the far more serious question of how important the changes may be. Every region on the planet has annual temperature swings — in fact daily temperature swings — far larger than the most grossly estimated changes in global temps (always bearing in mind how poor that metric is anyway). There is much reason to doubt that the temperature shifts, if real to begin with, would produce changes as predicted by the AGW gang.
I’m 99.9756453% in agreement with Gamecock.
It’s an old trick, putting out numbers to decimal points implies precision, even when no precision exists.
Howdy Mitch
Yes, this is one of the big issues that I saw 25 years ago. We’ve got people working two places right of the decimal point with instruments that are only good to the decimal point. That leaves out so many other issues about placement, diligence in record-keeping across hundreds of years, the flimsiness of paleo-climate proxies…climate and temperatures shift, but our ability to track the shift over the last two hundred years is much smaller than claimed.
Provided it was read currently in the first place. I never can tell exactly what they say, I just round to nearest big number I can see.