| Teeqoz said: But you don't measure the global average temperature. That makes no sense. You can't measure an average. Averages are calculated from many averages. We take measurements from both stations around the world, and satelites that continuously scan a small chaning part of earth's surface, and calculate the average. The measurements will be a finite number of measurements from a finite number of places. You then take the average for each individual place (to make sure places that have more measurements don't count more than places with fewer measurements), and then again take the average of those values to find the global average temperature. You can extrapolate the calculations to get an average for time periods as well. Honestly, the calculation is the simple part. Getting a huge dataset is the difficult part, but thanks to our advanced infrastructure and years of hard work and scientific progress, we have equipment many places in the globa that can measure temperature very accurately, giving us such a good dataset. |
You insist that we CAN possibly measure a global average but the physicist says otherwise, me on the other hand thinks you're going about it at a very simplistic way ...
The problem with your said methodology is that you can only measure a single point in space with a thermometer and you can only calculate the average with respect to time in that one point ...
How would you even think about measure the average temperature with respect to an AREA (surfaces & volumes) and TIME ?
If we attempted using your said methodology and created an aggregate of specifically collected data then there'd be lot's of serious discontinuities in the data that would preclude it from ever claiming that it accurately captures the temperature of the earth when that is not true since testing is done with geographical bias with higher population areas ...
The other problem with the methodology is that it would only work if Earth is in an equilibrium but that is never the case too ...
