Quote:
Originally Posted by dog8food
Can someone tell me how these current "scientists" set a standard temperature--of what the earth's climate 'should' be--when the earth's climate has always varied since the beginning of time?
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I understand the rhetorical nature of the question but there really is an answer... a disturbing answer... but there is an answer.
so you take the recorded record going back as far as you can, then put all that data in a computer. then you use various statistical methodologies to create a timeline and smooth for various inputs. smoothing over time to remove statistical anomalies etc...
once you have done all of that you can get a baseline, then you can pick a period you want to use as your "norm"
for the purposes of the current discussion, you go back to before the "Modern Warming Period" that started somewhere in the 1970s, and you determine the baseline over some period (I think mostly they used about 1900 to 1970).
Here is the disturbing point: you cannot control for variations in temperature recording variations. (different people reading the same or different thermometers). You cannot control for different methodologies of determining temperature before industrialization, thermometers were hand made and therefore likely not calibrated .... various manufacturing methods of different devices even after industrialization further exacerbates the issue.
You then have to contend with encroaching urbanization and the impact of Urban Heat Island Effect. We have seen in the record, a recording station was once set in a rural area, but urbanization encroached to the point that this once isolated station because surrounded by a concrete jungle. that's just a few of the issues.
now due to these realities you have further issues because databases that collect the information now have to "correct" for the best understanding of these and other known issues. Now you have humans making "corrections" on data sets. But one correction while it might be a good correction for some perceived error, will be done on the set and might not be the right correction for every collection point in the dataset. Now you have input some fix, and some exacerbated error. wash... repeat....
Some years ago during the "climate gate" thing, there was an email exchange that kind of dealt with the trainwreck that was the data set. These guys knew their data was a mishmash.
so there is the actual reality of the very disturbing process of setting the standard temperature.... and I haven't even gotten into the fact that that number has changed constantly over the Modern Warming Period, every time they did adjustments to the record.
One would be hard pressed to understand how they have depressed the temperature record of the Dust Bowl period while increasing the same record for the Modern Warming Period.
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