[jackmott]

Imagine a huge vat of water, you add some blue food coloring. it swirls around in there, predicting how blue any spot in the vat will be is very hard. predicting the total amount of blue is very easy.

the confidence on global temperature increase is quite high, you can arrive at the same trend that the serious efforts do with a random selection of a couple of hundred stations and without any corrections. I have done this in the past using raw noaa data.

That was sort of my “aha” moment

[pard68]

Are you saying the points matter the inbetweens don't? It doesn't matter what's happening in rural America or the middle of Africa, or Siberia, you have an average of various distributed points across the globe?

[lovecg]

If you record your thermometer readings over decades and average with other rural points across the globe you’ll see the same trend. This is not hypothetical either, we have this from looking at rural airports data for example - all publicly available and you can run the numbers yourself. Unless you think all people who set up thermometers at these airports are incompetent in exactly the same direction all over the world somehow.