«A careful survey of these stations by a team led by meteorologist Anthony Watts showed that 70 % of these stations have such poor siting that, by the U.S. government's own measure, they result in
temperature uncertainties of between two and five degrees Celsius or more.»
The new model found that
temperature uncertainty associated with the social component was of a similar magnitude to that of the physical processes, which implies that a better understanding of the human social component is important but often overlooked.
These analyses are complemented by sensitivity analysis of the spatial representativeness of available palaeoclimatic data, indicating that the warmth of the recent decade is outside the 95 % confidence interval of
temperature uncertainty, even during the warmest periods of the last millennium.