Fishing Instructor wrote:
I'm not following your reasoning. You question how one can have confidence in the data and link to the workproduct of an effort to determine the confidence interval for a bunch of measurement sites.
This is how the scientific method is supposed to work. Somebody proposes a theory that explains the observations and then you do your damnedest to find the flaws in that theory.
IllinoisMaster wasn't talking about the theory, he was pointing out how bad the data is. The error for the surface temperature record is larger than the measured change. And that's for the US data, international data is even worse. In other words, there is a chance the temperature rise the IPCC likes to show in their graphs hasn't actually occurred.
There's also a problem with the spatial coverage of the surface temperature record. Good coverage only exists for North America and Europe. For most of the time from 1880 until now coverage for Asia, Australia, Antarctica, South America, and Africa has been very thin or nonexistent. Coverage for the oceans, 70% of the earth's surface, is a joke. Only satellite data, which goes back 30 years, actually provides global coverage.