Temperature recording is vital to the whole climate change scenario. If the earth is getting warmer then it should be measurable. If we have a theory that the earth is getting warmer then that theory needs to start with measured temperatures getting warmer.
One of the interesting factors to have arisen since climatologists started worrying about this issue is the discrepancies between surface measurements and those recorded by satellites.
Part of the problem with surface measurements is the location of stations at airports, in urban areas and in simply inappropriate locations.
Another problem has just been reported by wattsupwiththat and this time it's human error.
Much of the surface temperature data is recorded at airports and used for supplying data to pilots. A particular format is used for these reports which provide a very detailed but dense and hard to read weather summary. One interesting and unique feature is that instead of - to indicate temperatures below freezing, this format uses M, so -7 becomes M7.
If the person entering the data (much of this is entered by hand), accidentally puts -7, or hits any other key than M, it comes up as +7.
This explains why hot spots seem to exist in very cold areas. It also explains why large swathes of very cold areas (where populations and airports are very thin on the ground) seem to be a lot hotter then they should be from time to time.
If that error is not corrected when people are working out averages, as is possibly the case, then one day's error in a month increases the average temperature for that month.
And when we are talking about temperature changes of less than one degree over the planet, these little errors suddenly become very significant!
Garbage in=garbage out=big grants for climatologists.
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