by I. Williams, Nov 09, 2025 in WUWT
I shall end with two unanswered questions. The reason for that lies in a story with eight decimal places of recondite mystery and scarcely believable deductions. One last glimpse of reality: the mean temperature of the world at the moment (early November) is hovering around 14 deg C, which is never used because it does not convey a sufficient element of danger in the global warming message. Fourteen degrees Celsius or fifty-seven Fahrenheit are not messages of imminent doom. Either one is the annual mean temperature of Bordeaux, San Francisco or Canberra.
Therefore the Wise Ones have decided that any global temperature given to the masses must always be shown as a difference from the mean of the half-century 1850-1900, which, they say, is representative of our world in smoke-free pre-industrial times. That period also happens to be towards the end of the Little Ice Age, which, the Met Office says, had ‘particularly cold intervals beginning in about 1650, 1770 and 1850.’ Cold spell beginning in 1850? Interesting.
Thus it was that on 10 January this year the Met Office told us that ‘The global average temperature for 2024 was 1.53±0.08°C above the 1850-1900 global average,’ This is an extraordinarily accurate figure but the World Meteorological Organisation has much the same: ‘The global average surface temperature [in 2024] was 1.55 °C … ± 0.13 °C … above the 1850-1900 average, according to WMO’s consolidated analysis.’ Ignore the scarcely believable accuracy of those second decimal places, there’s worse to come.
The obvious question is: Why were those fifty years chosen as the fundamental reference period? The answer is easily found: ‘Global-scale observations from the instrumental era began in the mid-19th century for temperature,’ says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their Fifth Assessment Report (Section B, page 4.) An associated IPCC Special Report (FAQ1.2 para 4) explains that ‘The reference period 1850–1900 … is the earliest period with near-global observations and is … used as an approximation of pre-industrial temperature.’ Note the categoric statements that sufficient data is available in that nineteenth century fifty-year period to calculate the global mean temperatures.
In 1850, may I remind you, Dickens was writing David Copperfield, California was admitted to the Union as the 31st state and vast areas of the earth were still unexplored. 1900 brought the Boxer Rebellion (China), the Boer War (South Africa) and the Galveston hurricane (USA). There were still quite large areas awaiting intrepid explorers.
I was curious about how in olden times those global temperatures were actually measured, but after a painstaking search of websites and yet again proving that AI-derived information can be both wrong and misleading, I turned in despair to the Met Office enquiry desk. Their reply was long and very detailed. No actual data, but several clues as to where to search. Very interesting clues.
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