Is the world getting warmer? How do you tell? One way is to look at temperature readings from the past. NOAA has collected thermometer readings going back to 1701 and posted them on line.
One would think, that you just average all the temperature readings over one year, and you have the average temperature for that year.
Other clever folks have been looking at the raw data and finding discrepancies in it. Jogs up and down, missing data, "urban heat island effect", and other stuff. The clever folk advocate "correcting" the data to "eliminate errors". Trouble is, the "correctors" seldom explain the basis of the "corrections". Worse, some of them work for NOAA and have been "correcting" the raw data files. The "hockey stick" graph was produced by "correcting" the data.
Years ago Scientific American did an article on historical temperature. They gathered up all sorts of records and them "corrected" the data for all sorts of effects. Scientific American, to its credit, did explain their corrections. After doing all the correction, the author declared a small amount of global warmin was visible. However, the amount of warming was smaller than the corrections applied.
Moral of the story. Stick with raw data. Corrections are untrustworthy.
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