The Economist has quite clear chart showing the decadal average temperatures from the 1850′s to today.
The obvious thing to note is that temperatures have risen fairly dramatically throughout the 20th century. But another interesting thing that this chart shows is a very large increase in technology giving us greater precision in measurement happening in the 1950′s. You can see this by the shortening of the error bars that happen after that time.
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Friday ~ July 30th, 2010 at 11:23 am
jazzbumpa
Two points:
The collapsing tolerance bands don’t affect the data points themselves. Take the true reading to be anywhere within the band, and the trend is still clear.
In a finer-grained cut, the data looks more like a stock chart. It’s even tempting to impose an Elliott Wave on the plot.
http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/research/globalchange/images/temp-1900_2000-001.gif
This idea seems outlandish, even to me. But if 1920 was the beginning of an up wave, we can expect a maximum sometime in the next few years, followed by a fairly sharp decline to the .1 to .3 deg C range, then an increase to a new peak, well above .8.
I hope I live long enough to see how this plays out.
Cheers!
JzB
Friday ~ July 30th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
Roland
Remember, of course, that the last three observations drag the average upwards..
Saturday ~ August 7th, 2010 at 9:03 pm
nick m
note also – the amount of the rise in temperature that is not related to natural causes – i.e. the amount of temperature increase due to human activity:
http://www.perceptric.com/blog/_archives/2010/6/15/4553669.html