The newspaper said, "The NASA findings indicate a mean worldwide temperature of about 58.496 degrees F in 1998, topping the previous record, set in 1995. of 58.154." I stared at this sentence for a long time. Then I started to think about global temperature, maybe for the first time. How, I asked myself, can we know the "mean worldwide temperature" to 1 thousandth of a degree F? Once my feeble brain got in gear, it didn't take long to realize that we can't -- can't possibly. So what, I asked, can we know about global temperature? Consider the following answer.
Way back when I was young, strong, and foolish, I took an evening graduate course -- 50 miles away by motorcycle over the rugged hills of western Pennsylvania. Coming home at night, I learned quickly that it was much colder in the valleys than on the ridges -- I would guess about 10 degrees colder. Given this sometimes painful variation, suppose I wanted to know what the average temperature was for one of those 50 mile trips, say to 1 degree F? How many readings, or stationary sensors, would I need? Think about it.
Absent a detailed mathematical model of the terrain and air flow, I guess 100 sensors might be enough --roughly one in each valley and on each ridge. Given the variation, it's not clear that this system would be accurate to one degree F, but it might be. Now suppose instead that I wanted to know about a 50 mile square, or 250 square miles. By extrapolation, that might possibly be done with 10,000 sensors.
The surface area of the earth is about 200 million square miles. So I reckon that it should take at least 8 billion sensors to maybe get to one degree accuracy, especially since temperature can vary 50 degrees in one day, and 100 degrees in a year, in many places. How many sensors is the 58.496 degrees NASA report based on? About 7,000 -- or significantly less than 8 billion. About one per 30,000 square miles in fact, but most of them are clustered in the U.S. and Europe . Moreover, this "global temperature record" we are supposed to act on dates back to 1880, when most of the globe was scientifically uninhabited. One questionable station per million square miles in many cases.
According to this 110 year record, the global mean temperature has risen about 1 degree F. Lacking the roughly 8 billion necessary sensors, taking good data for at least 100 years, I don't see that we have any reason to believe there has been any warming at all. Our measly 9 satellites, taking data for just 25 years, seem to confirm this. But basically we have no worldwide mean temperature data. Period. You can't get there with 7,000 stations, or 9 satellites. We know nothing about global mean temperature. Nothing, nothing, nothing at all.
Having grasped this awesome fact, my last question is this: Given our $1.3 billion a year climate change research program, why has nobody noticed that these global temperature reports are utterly preposterous? Is this a cruel hoax, or just a tragic blunder?
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