[PapaBear3625]

The big problem, as you note, is that these guys are trying to get grant money to study temperature variations of tenths of a degree, when most of their input data comes from somebody having taken an eyeball reading of a thermometer in a shed that was accurate to maybe +/- 2 degrees.

You also have to take into account the inclination of people to log a nice-sounding number rather than actually going out in crappy weather to take a reading.

Plus, land temperature readings do not really give a good measure of whether the Earth is warming up or not. For that, ocean measurements are better. Unfortunately, ocean measurements do not support the global warming hypothesis.

[Mr Rogers]

Exactly!

I always ask global warming folks why they think they know, within 1 degree even, the average world temperature in 1850. How many stations were there in the Yukon in 1850? How many in the Amazon? How many reading taken from the middle of the Pacific in 1850? How accurate were the gauges, and who thinks some guy in Alaska in the winter of 1850 was getting readings accurate to 1 degree, let alone 0.01 degree?

They just reply, “Science has proved...”