A regrettable aspect of the climate change debate is the way in which people assume we know things we do not. Especially those engaged in second-hand virtue signalling the easy way. For instance an article in AAOS Now, which if you do not saw through people’s bones regularly you may not know is the newsletter of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, warns that in the process of fixing your hip they are doing something nasty to the planet. Which seems improbable given the relatively small share of the U.S. economy held by the orthopedic sector. And also because the authors of this article appear to have no idea whatsoever what they’re talking about. The piece actually starts “2023 was the warmest year on Earth since global records began being tracked in 1850.” What? We do not expect authors in such a publication to be formally trained climate scientists. But we do think they might have, you know, Googled something to do with when and how “global records began being tracked in 1850.” Because it’s such utter rubbish that if they said something comparably culpably ignorant about medicine you would flee their clinic as fast as you could hobble.

What do they even think this statement means? That in 1850 a group of people decided to deploy thermometers in representative locations around the world and tabulate the results? Because if so, we’d be fascinated to know what group they believe did this thing, where the records were gathered and where they are stored. We follow it pretty closely and we don’t know about it.

What we do know is from actual data, of all wretched things. Specifically, and h/t Tony Heller who has repeatedly attempted to draw people’s attention to this issue with limited success among the zealotry, weather record collection until very recently was haphazard except in a few places in the Anglosphere, and basically nonexistent elsewhere. For instance here’s the NOAA’s own map of weather stations between 1831 and 1860:

Some global effort that is. But soft. They did say it began in 1850 so maybe it’s not fair to look at a map that stretches from shortly before to shortly after that time.

No problem. Being into data, we happily share NOAA’s map from 1891 to 1920. So it starts 41 years into this imaginary project and stretches to 70 years in:

Hmnnn. Global must not mean what we thought it did. And let us also here note that where there is good historical data, and the United States is the main place although parts of England, Australia and Canada are also good, the records for things like heatwaves, days over 90°F and so forth do not show unusual heat in recent decades. On the contrary, they appear to be declining (especially if you screen for the Urban Heat Island effect). And as Heller has repeatedly said, if the data comparison between things randomly collected in 2024 and not collected at all in 1870 in the Democratic Republic of Congo shows one thing, and that in Iowa where it’s been done carefully for both periods shows another, a rational data-driven person might distrust the former.

And another thing. The recent babble about July 22, 2024 being microscopically hotter than July 21, itself supposedly a blazing 0.01°C hotter than July 6, 2023 (and yes, you read that right and it’s not a typo, the claim was a margin of one one-hundredth of a degree), made no mention whatsoever of margins of error.

Seriously. This debate matters, so ask yourself: if someone told you they had measured the temperature in your living room on July 6, 2023 and again on July 21, 2024 and it was one one-hundredth of a degree warmer would you believe them? Would you at least want to see this prodigious measuring instrument capable of such fine gradations?

The journalists are not interested. Nor do they inquire into the methodology whereby “scientists” supposedly know the exact temperature, to a hundredth of a degree, on every single speck of land or fleck of sea on the vast planet Earth every single second, half-second or whatever it supposedly was of every day. Because everybody knows, right? But again, if you were confronted with that claim about your living room, might you not inquire idly how they’d handled the possibility of pockets of warmer or cooler air in the shag rug, on the dog or in someone’s coffee? And even if you are a very rich person, your living room is not close to being as big as Mauritius or Botswana or the Sargasso Sea, let alone the entire Earth.

So the blunt truth is that everybody doesn’t know. Worse, they don’t know they don’t know. (Donald Rumsfeld, call your office.) Indeed, we ourselves got interested in the way in which satellites measure temperature, which in case you’re an orthopedic surgeon or something we must mention does not involve dangling billions of thermometers on long silver wires from outer space. And thanks to an email thread with some informed and curious people, we learned something fascinating about the UAH satellite series, in our opinion the gold standard in these matters, via a report its creators filed with NOAA.

For instance:

“The raw measurements made by the MSU and AMSU instruments are radiometer output voltages digitized into digital counts.”

Are they now? Who saw that one coming? And now that it has shown up anyway, please note that while a “radiometer output voltage” may be a good proxy for temperature, it is just a proxy.

Also, not incidentally, AMSU stands for “Advanced Microwave Sounding Units” collected by various “NOAA polar orbiting satellites” up since mid-1998, “NASA’s Aqua satellite” (mid-2002) and “the European MetOp-B satellite (operating since 2013).” Also “Before AMSU, the Microwave Sounding Units (MSUs) flew on the NOAA polar orbiters since late 1978.” So it’s a mixed bag of data which should always inspire caution even regarding trends, let alone incredibly detailed exact numbers. Especially as this data is then heavily processed into “TLT (lower-tropospheric deep-layer average temperature” which is:

“computed as a linear combination of the values of TMT, TTP and TLS: TLT = 1.538xTMT – 0.548xTTP + 0.010xTLS). The coefficient values were determined to maximize the weighting function below the tropopause, with virtually no contribution from the stratosphere”.

We’re not knocking it. John Christy and Roy Spencer, the masterminds behind the UAH series, know their stuff and it’s the best available guess. But we are insisting that you realize that when they’re weighting TMT at 1.538 you don’t actually know how hot it is to hundredths of a degree since the weighting is an approximation and if they went and switched it to 1.548 for some reason it would change those outputs.

Also, Spencer and Christy have some capacity to write as clearly as the subject permits. For instance, they explain up-front that:

“The satellite-observed quantity which is interpreted as a measure of deep-layer average atmospheric temperature is the microwave brightness temperature (Tb) measured within the 50-60 GHz oxygen absorption complex. For specific frequencies in this band where the atmospheric absorption is so strong that the Earth’s surface is essentially obscured, the rate of thermal emission by the atmosphere is very nearly proportional to the temperature of the air. For example, the lower stratospheric temperature product (TLS) is almost 100% composed of thermal emission from atmospheric molecular oxygen.”

Almost. Not exactly. But note also that what they’re measuring and processing is itself not temperature but something oxygen does that is a proxy for temperature. Which is itself determined by another proxy, “radiometer output voltages digitized into digital counts”.

Also, they’re not sampling at various depths; they’re looking at the composite that comes out at the top of the sky and trying to disaggregate it and figure out exactly how warm it is two meters above the surface and in other places. And as they also caution:

“As a result, the middle tropospheric temperature (TMT) and lower tropospheric temperature (TLT) and to a small extent the tropopause layer (TTP) products have a component of surface emission ‘shining through’ the atmospheric layer being sensed which, depending upon the surface, may or may not be directly proportional to temperature of that surface.”

Does your head hurt yet? If so you have our sympathies. But when’s the last time a news story about global temperature even hinted at any of this complexity and uncertainty?

All of which, we say again, is to do with the satellite measures available in reasonable amount and reasonable quality only since 1979. And we trust that the authors of that AAOS Now drivel do not suppose that someone launched a fleet of steam-powered satellites in 1850, perhaps Jules Verne? Please say you don’t.

So now that we’ve staggered through a very simplified explanation of what the satellites call “temperature”, just imagine trying to explain what was used to calculate global temperature in 1920, or 1851 once this fictitious effort was launched. Describe for us please the quantity and location of the thermometers, and by location we mean not only what town they were in but how the instruments were sited and what sort of housing they had and how the temperatures were measured over the oceans which, recall, is 70 percent of the Earth’s surface. And how sure are you that the person charged with doing the measurements systematically at a certain time of day really did it then, even in New York City, never mind Kuala Lumpur or Kiribati, rather than realizing periodically that they’d forgotten, or slept in, and made up believable numbers.

And while we’re ranting, what the heck, how do they know exactly or even roughly how warm it was in 1216? Because they say 2023 was hotter. How do they know? Do they even care? Does it matter that back then, the English wine industry was so mighty it prompted cries for protective measures from France? And how about the Roman Warm Period?

They have no idea. And they don’t know they don’t, and they don’t care. But rubbish is rubbish no matter how it’s packaged. And people beating the climate alarmist drum are very often making noise not sense, having made no due-diligence effort to learn what’s behind the numbers and how much uncertainty there is. Or, in this case, whether there really was a systematic effort to track global temperature starting in 1850. No. No there was not. They just imagined it, then wrote it apodictically.

The authors are also quite ignorant of economics, apparently. For instance they say:

“Orthopaedic clinics have an appreciable carbon footprint, stemming from transportation, energy use, and material purchasing and disposal. Reducing that environmental impact often leads to cost savings, which is an important motivator for medical centers.”

Yup. And since the United States has for-profit medicine, just like Sweden, it means clinics are already desperately making every cost saving they can so there’s no need to yammer at them about it, especially as energy prices soar.

We also challenge their bedside manner, over bits like:

“Surgeons can encourage patients and staff to walk or cycle, use public transit, carpool, or use an EV. Building bus stops, bicycle racks, and EV charging stations near the clinic can make sustainable travel more feasible.”

Yup. Just cycle to and from your hip replacement or back surgery. What are you, a filthy oil-company-funded “denier”? Oh. You’re a person with limited mobility? It’s why you came to the clinic. Dawk. And do you really suppose that after 50 years of medical professionals telling us an active lifestyle is crucial to maintaining your health, anyone in the business hasn’t heard of bicycles and these marvellous innovative “bicycle racks”?

One more piece of foolishness before we go, because their last sentence can’t match their first for silliness but it is revealingly goofy:

“By making small changes, orthopaedic surgeons can help turn the tides in favor of a healthier, greener future for themselves, their patients, and future generations.”

No. No they cannot. Even if they all turn down the lights, put the computers to sleep, and cycle through a Montana winter carrying patients on their backs, the total reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions will be less than 0.01%. Too small to measure, in fact. Just like their common sense.