9 ms·

"The standard measuring conditions for temperature are in the air, 1.5 metres (5 ft) above the ground, and shielded from direct sunlight intensity" [1] Lots of

"The standard measuring conditions for temperature are in the air, 1.5 metres (5 ft) above the ground, and shielded from direct sunlight intensity" [1] Lots of people claim that their region/country has had hotter weather than the records, but I doubt the temperatures were taken in these more precise conditions. It's not like there aren't scientists and meteorologists all over the world (including Africa) who are measuring these things constantly. If you're standing on dark surface in a hot place, the air temperature can be much higher. "In recent years a ground temperature of 84 °C (183.2 °F) has been recorded in Port Sudan, Sudan." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#Measuring_conditions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#Measur...

stephen_g 6y ago
Yeah, we get a lot of that sort of claim in Australia, where the conservative side of politics have made climate change a massively politically polarised topic (it might not be a surprising coincidence that a lot of the major political donors to these parties have made billions from coal mining and natural gas extraction). We have media commentators and even members of parliament (!) actively trying to discredit our Bureau of Meteorology, pulling up newspaper reports and people's anecdotes of slightly higher temperatures recorded decades ago than records that have been broken just recently. It doesn't seem to a lot of these people to be a good argument that 1) thermometers weren't as accurately calibrated then as they were today, and 2) an observed temperature at your grandfather's farm that was taken from a thermometer hanging under a tin roof that was radiating heat at it isn't up to the standard of the official figures! Anyway, so at the end of the day it's extremely controversial that the official figures have been adjusted based on measured deviations between the technology used at the time and the more accurate measuring devices used today.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Of course, they see it the other way around, that it's the non-conservative side of politics that made it polarising. That's the nature of polarity ;) The adjustments to the historical temperature record are an under-discussed topic IMO. Most people don't know they occur. The justifications are by the way not that thermometers were inaccurately calibrated in the 1930s. Thermometer technology is very old. If there are datasets being adjusted that way, that's a new reason that I haven't seen when reviewing this controversy myself. The justifications are, at least for the USA, more like: 1. A claim that people before the 1980s didn't know how to use min/max thermometers and read them/reset them at the wrong time of day. So climatologists have a thing called time of observation bias adjustment, which supposedly corrects for this. 2. Thermometers got moved around over time, so they apply 'homogenization' algorithms to invent readings for thermometer locations that no longer exist 3. Thermometers often had gaps in their readings, so again, they interpolate readings that 'should' have happened from nearby thermometers. Because the thermometer network is getting older with time, the amount of interpolated data keeps going up. For instance the standard US thermometer network used for all American temperature timeseries now has >60% interpolated data generated by a model, they're not raw readings, because there's been so much movement over time. The counter-arguments are: 1. It's unscientific to quietly alter your data to fit your theories. If there are doubts about the accuracy of the readings, you are meant to add error bars and incorporate that into your uncertainty, not just publish new versions of historical timeseries like climatologists do. 2. The historical justification for TOB existing is not very strong. There's an assumption that people back then didn't know how to use min/max thermometers correctly, but there's not much in the historical record to actually support this claim, which is an odd one because, again, thermometers are an old technology and people were making records of temperature for a long time. A min/max thermometer is not a complex device. 3. Putting aside the fact that again, supposedly raw scientific datasets aren't meant to have interpolated data points in them, homogenization might make sense in the USA where there was a large and well resourced thermometer network throughout the 20th century. But that's not true for the rest of the world, which was busy being wracked by multiple world wars, communist insurrections, 3rd world poverty and so on. Temperature data outside the USA for much of the 20th century is quite sparse and not very high quality, especially as people didn't really care about global warming until the 1970s/1980s. 4. Climatologists have continually adjusted raw temperature readings in new dataset versions even for very recent measurements, like measurements taken in the 21st century. These adjustments always strengthen the case for global warming, they never produce contradictory evidence. So there is a risk of a file-drawer problem, where now the precedent was set that adjusting historical data is accepted, people keep trying different adjustments with different explanations and end up discarding the ones that would reduce the perceived threat.
  - rrrazdan 6y ago
    I found your argument cogent though without sources to back it up, hard to believe. I do not know why you are being downvoted though. Would it be possible to include sources around what you are claiming?
    - HideousKojima 6y ago
      Here's an overview of the adjustments that get made to climate data, from a "it doesn't really affect the overall trends you dumb skeptics" point of view: https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-data-adjustments-affect-global-temperature-records https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-data-adjustments-a... And here's a more skeptical source: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/06/bombshell-study-temperature-adjustments-account-for-nearly-all-of-the-warming-in-government-climate-data/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/06/bombshell-study-tempe...
      - TylerE 6y ago
        Calling watts up “skeptical” is like calling holocaust deniers history skeptics. It’s blatant propaganda. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anthony_Watts https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anthony_Watts https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/watts-up-with-that/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/watts-up-with-that/
      - hokkos 6y ago
        Skeptics means climate change denialist in your context.
        thu2111 6y ago
        No it doesn't. Very few "climate change skeptics" deny the climate changes. That's a very weak position and changes can be easily seen in almost any data set. Climate change denialism is a strawman position, designed specifically to sound extreme in order to stop people getting curious and investigating the real beliefs of these bloggers.
    - 6y ago
- AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  > where the conservative side of politics have made climate change a massively politically polarised topic Not to side with either part, but it always takes two to tango...
  - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
    That doesn't seem right. It takes only one group to twist the narrative into something that it doesn't have to be. "There's a virus that's killing people, based up on the current evidence we should all wear masks in an effort to stop it." "You're trampling on my freedoms by asking that I wear a mask." The first is an objective statement of fact, the second is twisting the message - it can easily get politicized without needing two parties to sink to that level. Now the first has to either engage or try to ignore it, but either way it'll continue to be politicized.
    - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
      The second statement is also a fact: wearing a mask violates people's freedom. Balancing safety and freedom is an ages old question.
      - padseeker 6y ago
        No one complains when a store posts the sign "no shoes no shirt no service" No one complains when a school has a dress code and someone is sent home for wearing "inappropriate attire" But there are an awful lot of complaints and concerns and discussions about freedom from people when asked to wear a mask, at least indoors. The problem is pretty simple - the oft used phrase "it should't be a partisan or political issue" is irrelevant because when one side the argument bases their beliefs strictly on the fact that they don't like the other side and will oppose everything not based on the merits of arguments and information but rather that they hate the other side, then EVERYTHING becomes partisan.
        AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
Ozzie_osman 6y ago
My favorite is when people use their cars thermometer to declare the temperature. Yes, of course your car that has been sitting in the sun with full-on greenhouse effect is going to read some insane record-breaking number, but no, that's not the real outside temperature.
- fho 6y ago
  No it is not ... but it is the temperature a lot of people are affected by, isn't it? Same with my south side office place directly behind a huge glass window, no AC [1]. Super nice too look out ... but 35+ °C on "normal" 25+ °C degree days. [1] Other parts of the building reflect sun light back on our window front ... I actually got pictures of objects on my desk casting two shadows.
  - oblio 6y ago
    > No it is not ... but it is the temperature a lot of people are affected by, isn't it? It's not comparable, though.
- mnw21cam 6y ago
  I have actually been repeatedly surprised at how sane the temperature measurement on my car is. It'll be sitting baking in the sun, then I get in and swelter, but the measurement is actually really close to what was forecast. Sometimes, I then drive off, only for the measurement to actually increase by a degree or two as I head into a different microclimate. If it was significantly affected by the greenhouse heat of the car body, it would decrease as I drove away, due to increased airflow. I don't know where they put the sensor, but I think they got it right.
  - seszett 6y ago
    > I don't know where they put the sensor, but I think they got it right. In all my recent cars, the sensor was on the underside of one of the side mirrors (and fairly precise as well).
    - 6y ago
nabla9 6y ago
* in open space away from buildings and trees, * on top of grass or dirt soil. * 1.5 m above the ground, shielded from sunlight and covered from the weather. * normal air flow around the thermometer
- Valgrim 6y ago
  So sticking a thermometer on an umbrella would do the trick?
  - nabla9 6y ago
    They look like this usually: https://www.weather.gov/images/iwx/webpages/coop/crs.gif https://www.weather.gov/images/iwx/webpages/coop/crs.gif
    - jtuente 6y ago
      Is there any study data comparing these kinds of thermometer boxes? They look like mini hotboxes that can heat up like a car left in the sun. edit: someone posted a wiki link for Stevenson screen below just after I asked.
madaxe_again 6y ago
I have taken a reading, in controlled conditions (in the shade of a berm next to an earthen road, digital thermometer accurate to +-0.1C), of 54.2C - admittedly over dust rather than vegetation, but there was no vegetation. I’d been collecting all sorts of data along our route (started from the U.K.), mostly just for the sake of it. This was in the Kazakh steppes, in 2012, about 100km NW of Aralsk - it was under 20% rh, and the heat was just unbearable - it took us tens of litres of water each per day to replenish sweat, just sitting on our asses in a car with no a/c. The dashboard melted. The glue in the headliner melted, and dripped down the walls. The grip on the steering wheel sloughed off, and the gear shift head glue melted, and that fell off too. At the end of the day, we had an uncomfortably hot shower with the remaining water that had been sat in the car with us. 54C, when measured as an accurate temperature, manifested as 60C on the thermometer in the car, which was its maximum, as it had shown that for several days before the LCD also melted. So yes, take the apocryphal tales of high temperatures with a big pinch of salt, as most will be overreported, but I can vouch that this particular temperature isn’t entirely unprecedented on Earth - what is worrying is that it is now frequent enough that it is being observed, rather than just being a random nutter in the dust with a penchant for data.
- thehappypm 6y ago
  The thing is, it's easy to measure hot temperatures. Put some foil together and you can boil water. Only real, scientific measurements matter.
  - madaxe_again 6y ago
    Yes, that was my point.
ardy42 6y ago
> "The standard measuring conditions for temperature are in the air, 1.5 metres (5 ft) above the ground, and shielded from direct sunlight intensity" [1] And they use enclosure like this to do that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen > If you're standing on dark surface in a hot place, the air temperature can be much higher. "In recent years a ground temperature of 84 °C (183.2 °F) has been recorded in Port Sudan, Sudan." I have a outdoor temperature sensor in one of those enclosures and one in my attic. On sunny days, the attic regularly reaches 140+ °F and is maybe 50+ °F hotter than the outside air. I'm sure if I put the sensor directly on the roof, it'd closer to the attic temp than the outdoor temp.

stephen_g 6y ago

Yeah, we get a lot of that sort of claim in Australia, where the conservative side of politics have made climate change a massively politically polarised topic (it might not be a surprising coincidence that a lot of the major political donors to these parties have made billions from coal mining and natural gas extraction). We have media commentators and even members of parliament (!) actively trying to discredit our Bureau of Meteorology, pulling up newspaper reports and people's anecdotes of slightly higher temperatures recorded decades ago than records that have been broken just recently. It doesn't seem to a lot of these people to be a good argument that 1) thermometers weren't as accurately calibrated then as they were today, and 2) an observed temperature at your grandfather's farm that was taken from a thermometer hanging under a tin roof that was radiating heat at it isn't up to the standard of the official figures! Anyway, so at the end of the day it's extremely controversial that the official figures have been adjusted based on measured deviations between the technology used at the time and the more accurate measuring devices used today.

thu2111 6y ago
Of course, they see it the other way around, that it's the non-conservative side of politics that made it polarising. That's the nature of polarity ;) The adjustments to the historical temperature record are an under-discussed topic IMO. Most people don't know they occur. The justifications are by the way not that thermometers were inaccurately calibrated in the 1930s. Thermometer technology is very old. If there are datasets being adjusted that way, that's a new reason that I haven't seen when reviewing this controversy myself. The justifications are, at least for the USA, more like: 1. A claim that people before the 1980s didn't know how to use min/max thermometers and read them/reset them at the wrong time of day. So climatologists have a thing called time of observation bias adjustment, which supposedly corrects for this. 2. Thermometers got moved around over time, so they apply 'homogenization' algorithms to invent readings for thermometer locations that no longer exist 3. Thermometers often had gaps in their readings, so again, they interpolate readings that 'should' have happened from nearby thermometers. Because the thermometer network is getting older with time, the amount of interpolated data keeps going up. For instance the standard US thermometer network used for all American temperature timeseries now has >60% interpolated data generated by a model, they're not raw readings, because there's been so much movement over time. The counter-arguments are: 1. It's unscientific to quietly alter your data to fit your theories. If there are doubts about the accuracy of the readings, you are meant to add error bars and incorporate that into your uncertainty, not just publish new versions of historical timeseries like climatologists do. 2. The historical justification for TOB existing is not very strong. There's an assumption that people back then didn't know how to use min/max thermometers correctly, but there's not much in the historical record to actually support this claim, which is an odd one because, again, thermometers are an old technology and people were making records of temperature for a long time. A min/max thermometer is not a complex device. 3. Putting aside the fact that again, supposedly raw scientific datasets aren't meant to have interpolated data points in them, homogenization might make sense in the USA where there was a large and well resourced thermometer network throughout the 20th century. But that's not true for the rest of the world, which was busy being wracked by multiple world wars, communist insurrections, 3rd world poverty and so on. Temperature data outside the USA for much of the 20th century is quite sparse and not very high quality, especially as people didn't really care about global warming until the 1970s/1980s. 4. Climatologists have continually adjusted raw temperature readings in new dataset versions even for very recent measurements, like measurements taken in the 21st century. These adjustments always strengthen the case for global warming, they never produce contradictory evidence. So there is a risk of a file-drawer problem, where now the precedent was set that adjusting historical data is accepted, people keep trying different adjustments with different explanations and end up discarding the ones that would reduce the perceived threat.
- rrrazdan 6y ago
  I found your argument cogent though without sources to back it up, hard to believe. I do not know why you are being downvoted though. Would it be possible to include sources around what you are claiming?
  - HideousKojima 6y ago
    Here's an overview of the adjustments that get made to climate data, from a "it doesn't really affect the overall trends you dumb skeptics" point of view: https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-data-adjustments-affect-global-temperature-records https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-data-adjustments-a... And here's a more skeptical source: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/06/bombshell-study-temperature-adjustments-account-for-nearly-all-of-the-warming-in-government-climate-data/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/06/bombshell-study-tempe...
    - TylerE 6y ago
      Calling watts up “skeptical” is like calling holocaust deniers history skeptics. It’s blatant propaganda. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anthony_Watts https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anthony_Watts https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/watts-up-with-that/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/watts-up-with-that/
    - hokkos 6y ago
      Skeptics means climate change denialist in your context.
      - thu2111 6y ago
        No it doesn't. Very few "climate change skeptics" deny the climate changes. That's a very weak position and changes can be easily seen in almost any data set. Climate change denialism is a strawman position, designed specifically to sound extreme in order to stop people getting curious and investigating the real beliefs of these bloggers.
  - 6y ago
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
> where the conservative side of politics have made climate change a massively politically polarised topic Not to side with either part, but it always takes two to tango...
- SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
  That doesn't seem right. It takes only one group to twist the narrative into something that it doesn't have to be. "There's a virus that's killing people, based up on the current evidence we should all wear masks in an effort to stop it." "You're trampling on my freedoms by asking that I wear a mask." The first is an objective statement of fact, the second is twisting the message - it can easily get politicized without needing two parties to sink to that level. Now the first has to either engage or try to ignore it, but either way it'll continue to be politicized.
  - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
    The second statement is also a fact: wearing a mask violates people's freedom. Balancing safety and freedom is an ages old question.
    - padseeker 6y ago
      No one complains when a store posts the sign "no shoes no shirt no service" No one complains when a school has a dress code and someone is sent home for wearing "inappropriate attire" But there are an awful lot of complaints and concerns and discussions about freedom from people when asked to wear a mask, at least indoors. The problem is pretty simple - the oft used phrase "it should't be a partisan or political issue" is irrelevant because when one side the argument bases their beliefs strictly on the fact that they don't like the other side and will oppose everything not based on the merits of arguments and information but rather that they hate the other side, then EVERYTHING becomes partisan.
      - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago

Ozzie_osman 6y ago

My favorite is when people use their cars thermometer to declare the temperature. Yes, of course your car that has been sitting in the sun with full-on greenhouse effect is going to read some insane record-breaking number, but no, that's not the real outside temperature.

fho 6y ago
No it is not ... but it is the temperature a lot of people are affected by, isn't it? Same with my south side office place directly behind a huge glass window, no AC [1]. Super nice too look out ... but 35+ °C on "normal" 25+ °C degree days. [1] Other parts of the building reflect sun light back on our window front ... I actually got pictures of objects on my desk casting two shadows.
- oblio 6y ago
  > No it is not ... but it is the temperature a lot of people are affected by, isn't it? It's not comparable, though.
mnw21cam 6y ago
I have actually been repeatedly surprised at how sane the temperature measurement on my car is. It'll be sitting baking in the sun, then I get in and swelter, but the measurement is actually really close to what was forecast. Sometimes, I then drive off, only for the measurement to actually increase by a degree or two as I head into a different microclimate. If it was significantly affected by the greenhouse heat of the car body, it would decrease as I drove away, due to increased airflow. I don't know where they put the sensor, but I think they got it right.
- seszett 6y ago
  > I don't know where they put the sensor, but I think they got it right. In all my recent cars, the sensor was on the underside of one of the side mirrors (and fairly precise as well).
  - 6y ago

nabla9 6y ago

* in open space away from buildings and trees, * on top of grass or dirt soil. * 1.5 m above the ground, shielded from sunlight and covered from the weather. * normal air flow around the thermometer

Valgrim 6y ago
So sticking a thermometer on an umbrella would do the trick?
- nabla9 6y ago
  They look like this usually: https://www.weather.gov/images/iwx/webpages/coop/crs.gif https://www.weather.gov/images/iwx/webpages/coop/crs.gif
  - jtuente 6y ago
    Is there any study data comparing these kinds of thermometer boxes? They look like mini hotboxes that can heat up like a car left in the sun. edit: someone posted a wiki link for Stevenson screen below just after I asked.

madaxe_again 6y ago

I have taken a reading, in controlled conditions (in the shade of a berm next to an earthen road, digital thermometer accurate to +-0.1C), of 54.2C - admittedly over dust rather than vegetation, but there was no vegetation. I’d been collecting all sorts of data along our route (started from the U.K.), mostly just for the sake of it. This was in the Kazakh steppes, in 2012, about 100km NW of Aralsk - it was under 20% rh, and the heat was just unbearable - it took us tens of litres of water each per day to replenish sweat, just sitting on our asses in a car with no a/c. The dashboard melted. The glue in the headliner melted, and dripped down the walls. The grip on the steering wheel sloughed off, and the gear shift head glue melted, and that fell off too. At the end of the day, we had an uncomfortably hot shower with the remaining water that had been sat in the car with us. 54C, when measured as an accurate temperature, manifested as 60C on the thermometer in the car, which was its maximum, as it had shown that for several days before the LCD also melted. So yes, take the apocryphal tales of high temperatures with a big pinch of salt, as most will be overreported, but I can vouch that this particular temperature isn’t entirely unprecedented on Earth - what is worrying is that it is now frequent enough that it is being observed, rather than just being a random nutter in the dust with a penchant for data.

thehappypm 6y ago
The thing is, it's easy to measure hot temperatures. Put some foil together and you can boil water. Only real, scientific measurements matter.
- madaxe_again 6y ago
  Yes, that was my point.

ardy42 6y ago

> "The standard measuring conditions for temperature are in the air, 1.5 metres (5 ft) above the ground, and shielded from direct sunlight intensity" [1] And they use enclosure like this to do that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen > If you're standing on dark surface in a hot place, the air temperature can be much higher. "In recent years a ground temperature of 84 °C (183.2 °F) has been recorded in Port Sudan, Sudan." I have a outdoor temperature sensor in one of those enclosures and one in my attic. On sunny days, the attic regularly reaches 140+ °F and is maybe 50+ °F hotter than the outside air. I'm sure if I put the sensor directly on the roof, it'd closer to the attic temp than the outdoor temp.