No, you should not agree with TomK’s take on global temperature records. We are taught how to calculate averages (means) in the fifth or sixth grade. In review for those whom have forgotten those math classes, an average (mean) is determined by summing all values and dividing the sum by the total number of values.
The changes in global temperature are determined by averaging temperature data from thousands of weather stations all over the planet, land and sea (islands), all using the same measuring protocols. These measurements have been compiled for over a hundred years. Add to the weather station records, are millions of additional temperature measurements from other thermometers, satellites, and buoys (lakes and oceans). Over the last couple of decades, ocean temperatures at 10-meter depth also have been collected, and those data are now showing the upward warming trend as well, which is especially bad news as the oceans apparently are no longer absorbing all the excess heat in surface waters as they had been doing since CO2 values began to climb.
During the past two years, the average global temperature blew by the 1.5 C rise threshold that the Paris Climate Accord in 2015 stated should be the upper limit to avoid catastrophic global environmental consequences (ex, sea-level rise, flooding, wild fires, etc). The year 2023 was an El Niño year in which global temperature values are commonly above average, but 2024 was a transition year into a cooler La Niña, yet the average global temperature continued to go up. And, yes, indeed we can measure temperatures down to a tenth of a degree C, if not hundredths of a degree C everywhere.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying that a “year was the warmest on record,” as the record applies to the past 100+ years of temperature measurements, not earlier times like the when the dinosaurs roamed Earth in the Mesozoic. These red herring arguments are demeaning to our intelligence.
