Open It Up

clipped from jerrypournelle.com So: 5% of the Earth's temperature is determined by 50 (actually it's more like 30, but call it 50) thermometers reporting daily. .05X = 50 so we have about 1,000 thermometers to determine the Earth's land temperature. Since the land is 30% of the earth's surface, .30X = 1000 and we have 3,333 thermometers to determine the entire temperature of the earth. (I doubt we have that many, but it'll do for this.) That means 3,333 data points ever hour, or 29,200,000 data points a year. At 8 bytes per data point we're talking about 2 gigabytes of data per year; meaning that everyone reading this has the capacity to store that much data, and probably the computing power to do daily averages and print out trend curves. That's publishing a few gigabytes of data per year, or some 10 megabytes a day. Let everyone on earth look at the data, and do things like calculate differences between raw and corrected data. We can all look at the trends and differences.