-LRB-!!!!!!) Only thing missins when working with anomalies and not absolute temperatures is... the nowledge
of absolute temperatures for a given time.
By coincidence, yesterday was also the scheduled update for the GISTEMP July temperature release, and because July is usually the warmest month of the year on an absolute basis, a record in July usually means a record
of absolute temperature too.
The models allow this high resolution satellite data to be used to interpolate between the sparse but very accurate observations from land stations, which form a
network of absolute temperature value «tie points» - allowing calibration of the fine scale overall satellite derived relative changes.
My point is that looking at a
table of absolute temperatures (or expanding the y axis in a graph to show these) can be more intuitive and in some instances express better the relative magnitude of the observed changes.
One final fact that is very often overlooked is that the amount of heat radiated by the earth into space varies as the fourth power
of the absolute temperature.
Stefan - Boltzmann's Law States that the total energy emitted by a black body, integrated over all wavelengths, is proportional to the fourth power
of its absolute temperature (Temperature in Kelvins).