Climate Change Tracker

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.

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

I think we have more than enough data points around the globe to say that the temperature increase is statistically significant. Rural USA is not the center of the world where all temperature measurements should be based on.

If you drop a bucket of water at the top of a slide, it's difficult to predict where each individual water molecule will end up, but it's clear enough for practical purposes that the water will, on net, move down the slide and we can determine with reasonable accuracy the overall rate.

This is the difference between predicting a coin flip and predicting the proportion of heads after 1,000,000 coin flips. In one you’re completely off half of the time. In the other you’ll be accurate to many decimal places.

Basically, the concept of “What temperature is it outside my house?” And “How much have temperatures raised around the globe?” Are wildly different. The fact that the units are the same is misleading.

I suspect you missed my point

Are you saying the points matter the inbetweens don't? It doesn't matter what's happening in rural America or the middle of Africa, or Siberia, you have an average of various distributed points across the globe?

Exactly. Economic forces dictate the outcome. Often I feel my local politicians sound more like shamans. I don’t think giving them a bunch of power over sinners is going to change the weather.

If you record your thermometer readings over decades and average with other rural points across the globe you’ll see the same trend. This is not hypothetical either, we have this from looking at rural airports data for example - all publicly available and you can run the numbers yourself. Unless you think all people who set up thermometers at these airports are incompetent in exactly the same direction all over the world somehow.

Climate scientists have been producing accurate predictions for the global climate for half a century. Large models like that aren’t perfect but things like the early 90s IPCC reports have held up quite well.

Your point is to insert noise in to a conversation that you have zero scientific background in.

You’re not bringing up points that experts are failing to comprehend. You’re just trying to muddy the waters.

Compare the problem of estimating when an aggregate number of people will have contracted COVID with predicting when any individual person will contract COVID. Both can be steered, but until we do, it has a predictable rate in aggregate but is nearly impossible to determine in individual instances.

Do you normally find questions to be attacks?

Yes, when the topic is politicized