It's interesting when you look at the temperature record that the data sources are NASA/GISS, but the record goes back way further than these organisations have

It's interesting when you look at the temperature record that the data sources are NASA/GISS, but the record goes back way further than these organisations have existed. So we ask, where does the data come from? The bulk of the earlier record is from standard weather stations enclosed in stevenson screens, which are dotted around the globe in cities and remote areas. The number of these has varied over the timeframe shown here, as some have been abandoned over the years, and the nations responsible for them have changed. A first, obvious question one might ask is: Where can I get the raw data for all of these weather stations since the recordkeeping began? To which one might suspect there's probably a freely available corpus for all climate scientists to look at. You'd think completely wrong though. There is no data. The data from these stations is aggregated in national weather organizations, who publish only an "average" temperature. Most of the raw data archive is lost. What data you can actually acquire (perhaps you can get more if you have 'credentials'), is rather limiting, and vague as to what it represents. This is the main reason I look at climate science with a pinch of salt. All of the scaremongering depends on this so called temperature record dating back to 1880, but they're comparing apples and oranges. In any science experiment, you take the variable you wish to measure and attempt to keep everything else constant. In climate science, the means of measuring surface temperature is allowed to be variable - it's changed significantly since 1880. The recent record uses satellite imagery in addition to the surface measurements for example. Still, climate scientists are treating it as though the data they have is from a fixed number of weather stations in fixed locations, where any human activity around them can be considered to have no effect. This reality doesn't exist. What is really behind this data of NASAs is "an adjusted view of surface temperature from 1880 to 2014", where the adjustments are made based on hundreds of theories and climate models proposed by many other climate scientists (albeit in peer reviewed works). I want to believe that the state of AGW is as dire as it is made out to be, but until I have the raw data at hands reach for any of these publications, and we can start comparing oranges to oranges, I remain sceptic.