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447 points Brajeshwar | 1 comments | 03 Sep 23 14:53 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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pard68 ◴[03 Sep 23 17:47 UTC] No.37372440[source]▶
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.

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jackmott ◴[03 Sep 23 17:52 UTC] No.37372506[source]▶
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

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pard68 ◴[03 Sep 23 18:45 UTC] No.37373094[source]▶
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?
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1. lovecg ◴[03 Sep 23 18:59 UTC] No.37373243[source]▶
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.