Sunday 18 May 2008

Earth Surface Temperature Since 1884

Earth surface temperature since 1884. Video released by NASA and GISS.



(via Ursi's Blog)

6 comment(s):

Anonymous said...

O-kay now that worrying

Dave said...

OMG..."proof" that "global warming" is REAL!!!

Good. I hate cold weather.

Canopenner said...

yeah they had thermal imagining satellites in 1884 dave. They were also tracking temperature in antartica! even tho no one was at the south pole until 1911. You right wingers and your refusal to see the truth is astounding.

Canopenner said...

after watching this a second time I think its pretty funny how its warmer in alaska than in souther california for at least 35 years in the beginning. Also its warmer in the former soviet union than the sahara desert during that same time period...

brendan said...

@canopenner, I wondered about that too, so I looked it up on the Nasa site and there they explain the meaning of the different colours: they represent variation from the mean for that area - not an absolute temperature. So if the mean for California is 15 and the mean for Antartica is 0, but for a given year California is 16 and Antartica is 5, then Antartica will be a darker orange than California.

Anna said...

An interesting animation, but very misleading. The difference between dark blue and dark red is under 1C, for starters. With the colour change, it looks like some huge difference. There's also the use of the "stretched" map of the world (going from a 3D globe to a 2D surface distorts a great deal, which can be compensated for, but they never do that), which make the north and south pole changes seem larger than they really are.

Throw in the fact that earlier temperatures are really just educated guesses (which is true of all climatic reconstructions, but NASA/GISS is notorious for fudging their data) and that their modern data is from alarmingly corrupted weather stations, it's unfortunate that temperature data from NASA/GISS cannot be trusted. :-(