This week NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information announced that the 2016 global averaged surface temperature of the earth set a new record over the previous record, 2015, by a whopping .07 degrees farenheit. This sounds alarming, and it must be a very complicated job to measure “global average surface temperature”. I’m sure this made tantalizing headlines in all the usual news outlets.
Remembering my high school chemistry and physics classes (dimly), I wondered what the statistical margin of error for this data was. And I had to drill down a couple of pages into the sources to find it, but there it was. The number is plus or minus .27 degrees F over the statistical 20th century average.
Obviously that means that there could have been satistically been a huge decrease in the global temperature as surely as there could have been an equally larger increase! And I wonder if they measured “global average surface temperature” in 1900 the same way that they measured it in 2000 to arrive at that 20th century average?
The bottom line is, you can interpret the results of this data anyway you like to suit your own agenda. Lord knows the “National Centers for Environmental Information” are.
Here’s a link to their data:
http://www.noaa.gov/stories/2016-marks-three-consecutive-years-of-record-warmth-for-globe