Over the years, scientists in different parts of the world have worked hard to get a more accurate picture of the change in global surface temperature over time. This is slow painstaking work. Initially it would have meant working with written records, with people trying to decipher handwriting of the tens of thousands of people who wrote down readings of temperature and rainfall, and other weather indicators, from all the weather stations around the world. Over time the data was digitised - another extremely laborious task.
I'm not going to write about all that's been done. It's a mammoth ongoing effort involving people from all around the world. What I'm writing about are the ignorant scoffers. You know the people I mean. The ones who sit at their keyboards all day to snipe at the work done by scientists.
Anthony Watts has put up three articles from one chap who's been looking to see the extent of this careful work, as measured by adjustments to the original data. He's only looked at two data sets. One which is used by NASA and NOAA for global land surface temperatures. The Global Historical Climatology Network Data or GHCN. This was first developed in the early 1990s, with the current version 3 released in 2011. The other is the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN), which is the high quality dataset used by NOAA for USA temperatures since 1987.
