Global Temperature Trend Measurements

Today's post is a bit more down to earth than my usual space based links. In case you ever wondered about those rankings you see in the headlines like "2010 ties 2005 as the warmest year ever", here's an article about how they figure this out, and what it really means.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2010-climate-records.html

This might help answer some questions that could come up in the BNCL. The key point I think is that it is not the individual years rankings that matter, but the decade by decade rankings that really count. There is a lot of variation and noise in the data for each year, but if you start looking at the decade time scale, the trend becomes very clear.