Anyone who has had a min/max thermometer for more than about three days figures out that you have to reset the thermometer at night. Otherwise, half of your readings are going to be incorrect.
For instance, if day one had a high temperature of 72 degrees at 3PM, the observer took their reading every day at 3PM, and a cold front came through that night – day two would also record a bogus high temperature of 72 degrees.
I figured this out when I was seven years old. The largest GISS/USHCN post 2000 adjustment is based on the idea that the observers are all morons (like the people making the adjustments.) It also assumes that a few climate activists can deduce the day to day behavior of tens of thousands of observers over the last two centuries.
Progressives have always considered themselves smarter than the ‘masses’, and those that have preceded them. And because of this, they are always wrong.
99% perspiration, 1% inspiration: works.
99% inspiration, 1% perspiration: …and you have AGW.
They are wrong because they are lazy, sloppy, and stupid.
It would be interesting to reverse the adjustments to answer the question just how stupid the observers must have been, and whether that matches reality.
Supposedly, at some stations, only one observation was done per day. In other cases, two. Given that we know the daily fluctuations in temperatures (or at least we used to), how many hours must what % of observers need to be off in their thermometer reset time to justify the adjustments we have seen?
It must be a ridiculous number (like they forgot to reset it from June through October). The daily observations are supposedly quality controlled for repeat readings already.
Might be fun if I ever get the time…
There is a simple device called a “max-min” thermometer that has been around for at least a hundred years. Thus, unless the observer is a pathological liar or there is a rare thermometer malfunction, he is just accurately recording what those thermometers are telling him.
If the observer is a pathological liar or the thermometer is broken, it will be easily detected once it is realized that the readings are “off” compared to other surrounding stations.
It would seem quite obvious, with temperatures now being an integral part of an agenda (with a huge amount of money at stake) that there are going to be more “pathalogical liars” at present time than there were 50 or 100 years ago.
It would seem to me that a max/min thermometer would not accurately give you the avg temp (i.e. simple avg of high and low readings). The accurate method would be to integrate under the temp vs. time curve for each 24 hr period, then dividing by 24. If want to truly account for heat content, you would have to take into account ambient humidity. I’m not even talking about proper quantity and distribution and location of surface stations, or ocean stations (e.g. Arctic).
My point is that there is so much potential for measurement error, and we are to believe in temp trends on the order of 0.1 deg C per decade, and distinguish from variations due to natural cycles that last decades to centuries? What is the magnitude of error introduced by numerous confounding variables?
Dr. John, There are quirky happenings, like a cold front blowing thru at 12:05 AM and the afternoon high being 40 degrees below the “midnight max”. Or a sudden warmup in the late evening causing a midnight max on the other side. But those types of events are relatively rare and would not skew the data very much.