Fascinating course and well-presented although raising more questions than answers given the depth of my ignorance.
I'm still confused by our ability to use a single temperature to characterise global climate.
I'll start with the last 50 years which has used very sophisticated ground and satellite based techniques for measuring the weather. Put simply I don't understand what methods have been used for averaging over the Earth's surface. Taking an extreme case: how are temperatures in the Himalayas accommodated? Do they contribute according to the area exposed to the atmosphere because that would be most appropriate for heat transfer and sublimation? Or is the area taken simply as that on a map, i.e. projected area? And if the latter, what allowance if any is made for altitude?
And tree rings presumably provide evidence on temperature and rainfall in the growing season but what assumptions have to be made about the rest of the year?
Ice cores go back millennia and provide evidence on relatively long periods of time so what assumptions are made about the variability within those periods?
Good discussions of these matters at: UEA FAQs and on the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies pages. Also some explanations at the latter site about how data from ice cores, tree rings etc etc are consolidated.
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Is it too late to reverse the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on global climate? Or is it time to acknowledge the inevitable and start tackling the consequences?
