The biggest pitfall
of early temperature readings from Derham and others may not be the reliability of the readings, but rather that there are so few of them, and that they cover such a small patch of the Earth's surface.
The researchers used the measured temperatures from these two sites and the isotope data from the ice core from the overlapping time period (a method called «scaling») to quantitatively
reconstruct earlier temperature variations.
Astrobiology Goal 4: Life on Early Earth Astrobiology Goal 5: Environmental Limits of Life A Question of Climate Tiny Pieces of Time Clues from Vesta Earth's
Early Temperature Early Earth with Crust Please
Furthermore, from the latest emails, it appears that
although earlier temperature records were available, they were not used because they did not contain a «temperature signal» presumably meaning that the match with the reconstruction was not particularly good.
Van Oldenborgh used both modern and
early temperature records, as well as sources like tree rings, which can act as a proxy for very old temperatures, to observe Europe's temperature records back to 1500 and determined that 2014 will almost certainly be the warmest year Europe has experienced during the past 500 years.
Reinhard Böhm, a climatologist at the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics in Vienna, spent much of the past two decades
reconstructing early temperatures from this region, based on several thermometer series that began between 1760 and 1780.
The First Temperatures
The earliest temperature measurements by Derham and others amounted to a sort of religious inquiry: They documented not only the weather, but also the body sizes of gnats and wasps and the dates on which snowdrop flowers bloomed and thrushes began to sing each spring.
But
those early temperatures are now a tool unto themselves, helping scientists tease out when humans might have started to warm Earth's climate — and suggesting that the warming may be greater than first thought.
If the surface and lower atmosphere become warmer than the temperature set by insolation, gravity and mass they will emit more energy to space, there will be more energy outgoing than incoming and the system will cool back to
the earlier temperature.
But this year it got really cold faster than ever, breaking a 30 - year - old record for
the earliest the temperature has dropped below minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 73.3 degrees Celsius).»
Specific international global data analyses use
some early temperature data from Australia to construct monthly and annual - mean hemispheric and global temperature averages.