Climate Change: Earth Surface Temperature Data by Berkeley Earth.
From the webpage:
Some say climate change is the biggest threat of our age while others say it’s a myth based on dodgy science. We are turning some of the data over to you so you can form your own view.
Even more than with other data sets that Kaggle has featured, there’s a huge amount of data cleaning and preparation that goes into putting together a long-time study of climate trends. Early data was collected by technicians using mercury thermometers, where any variation in the visit time impacted measurements. In the 1940s, the construction of airports caused many weather stations to be moved. In the 1980s, there was a move to electronic thermometers that are said to have a cooling bias.
Given this complexity, there are a range of organizations that collate climate trends data. The three most cited land and ocean temperature data sets are NOAA’s MLOST, NASA’s GISTEMP and the UK’s HadCrut.
We have repackaged the data from a newer compilation put together by the Berkeley Earth, which is affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study combines 1.6 billion temperature reports from 16 pre-existing archives. It is nicely packaged and allows for slicing into interesting subsets (for example by country). They publish the source data and the code for the transformations they applied. They also use methods that allow weather observations from shorter time series to be included, meaning fewer observations need to be thrown away.
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All the computation on climate change is ironic in the face of a meteorologist, Edward R. Lorenz, publishing in 1963, Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow.
You may know that better as the “butterfly effect.” That very small changes in starting conditions can result in very large final states, which are not subject to prediction.
If you find Lorenz’s original paper tough sledding, you may enjoy When the Butterfly Effect Took Flight by Peter Dizikes. (Be aware the links to Lorenz papers in that post are broken, or at least appear to be today.)
In debates about limiting the increase in global temperature, recall that no one knows where any “tipping points” may lie along the way. That is the recognition of “tipping points” is always post tipping.
Given the multitude of uncertainties in modeling climate and the money to be made by solutions chosen or avoided, what do you think will be driving climate research? National interests and priorities or some other criteria?
PS: Full disclosure. Humanity has had, is having an impact on the climate and not for the better, at least in terms of human survival. Whether we are capable of changing human behavior enough to alter results that won’t be seen for fifty or more years remains to be seen.