Our first official +1.5C year. Well done everyone! It's amazing how good we are at f@$king everything up.

Originally posted by Quatrojos: ↑

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/13/5976

Hey Dave,

You should check out this study as it highlights some of the uncertainties involved in estimating global mean temperature anomaly to within such fine limits.

Some highlights:

“We do not know even now how far from truth the readings recorded are on any stand, but only how far they differ from a certain standard, and that standard is believed to be somewhat faulty”

Before any further policy decisions are to be made on the grounds of a warming climate, full and complete analysis of the air and sea-surface temperature record must be engaged, completed, and reported by multiple independent professionally disinterested and metrologically expert third-party engineering groups. Only this will resolve the forefront problem of reliability brought into focus here. Notions of unprecedented warming and disastrous outcomes deriving from the previously published air-temperature record are scientifically unsustainable. Their wider significance must, instead, await unconflicted metrological and economic analyses. Causality remains deeply at issue [256,257,258,259,260,261].

Direct evidence of a warming climate since the 19th century includes the lengthened growing season, the revegetation of the far North, and the poleward migration of the northern tree line [274,275,276,277,278,279,280,281,282,283]. However, at the 95% level of uncertainty, neither the rate nor the magnitude of 19th or 20th century warming can be known. A more detailed appraisal of errors may modify the uncertainty bounds, but an alternative conclusion is unlikely.The 20th century surface air-temperature anomaly, 0.74 ± 1.94 °C (2σ), does not convey any knowledge of rate or magnitude of change in the thermal state of the troposphere. Climate alarm on that account is unjustifiable. The Joule-drift that certainly plagued all LiG thermometers manufactured prior to 1885 obviates the reliability of earlier air-temperature measurements. The global averaged surface air-temperature anomaly record cannot sustain any notion of unprecedented climate warming over the last 200 years, or over any other timespan.

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This paper has been completely discredited.

Here the conclusion to an article on Skepitcal science found here https://skepticalscience.com/frank_propagation_uncertainty.html .

I suggest you read the whole thing

Conclusion
You might ask, how did this paper get published? Well, the publisher is MDPI, which has a questionable track record. The journal - Sensors - is rather off-topic for a climate-related subject. Frank’s paper was first received on May 20, 2023, revised June 17, 2023, accepted June 21, 2023, and published June 27, 2023. For a 46-page paper, that’s an awfully quick review process. Each time I read it, I find something more that I question, and what I’ve covered here is just the tip of the iceberg. I am reminded of a time many years ago when I read a book review of a particularly bad “science” book: the reviewer said “either this book did not receive adequate technical review, or the author chose to ignore it”. In the case of Frank’s paper, I would suggest that both are likely: inadequate review, combined with an author that will not accept valid criticism.
The paper by Patrick Frank is not worth the electrons used to store or transmit it. For Frank to be correct, not only would the entire discipline of climate science need to be wrong, but the entire discipline of introductory statistics would need to be wrong. If you want to understand uncertainty in global temperature records, read the proper scientific literature, not this paper by Patrick Frank.

Additional Skeptical Science posts that may be of interest include the following:

Of Averages and Anomalies (first of a multi-part series on measuring surface temperature change).

Berkeley Earth temperature record confirms other data sets

Are surface temperature records reliable?