Talk:Temperature record

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This climate change-related article is part of WikiProject Climate Change, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to articles on Wikipedia related to climate change and global warming. You can help! Visit the project page or discuss an article at its talk page. We are focusing on Temperature record.

(William M. Connolley 22:43, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)) I created this page, following discussion Talk:Temperature_record_of_the_past_1000_years#No_one_has_objected, as a link page for the various temperature records pages from various sources.

[edit] Geologic Temperature Record

I created a page on the geologic temperature record in order to provide a place for a deep time perspective for changes in Earth's climate. Right now it is pretty qualitative and not well-documented, but at least it is a start. Dragons flight 07:24, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)

Paleoclimatology ? — SEWilco 08:25, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Followup moved to Talk:Geologic temperature record

[edit] Temperature records

Since the title of this article is "Temperature Record", it should be limited to the discussion of, well, temperature records and not speculations about past temperatures (when there were no records) based upon inferences drawn from secondary or tertiary sources.--JonGwynne 04:37, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The information and the comparisons are valuable. Rather than taking a hatchet to it, how about discussing ways to improve the description if it bothers you to refer to these as "records"? Personally, I don't really consider it a problem since I doubt anyone would be confused into thinking that they had well-calibrated thermometers thousands (let alone millions) of years ago. Dragons flight 05:14, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)

There are plenty of places elsewhere that discuss these data and plenty of links to those places. My point here is simply that when in an article called "Temperature record", we should stick to the subject of the article. See what I mean? If I wrote an article entitled "Major League Baseball" and started talking about hockey, that wouldn't be appropriate, right? In reality, this article should probably be deleted as it serves no useful purpose and doesn't contain any information that can't be found elsewhere.--JonGwynne 05:55, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I found it useful. And maybe the information is elsewhere but this was my fourth Google hit - and the other three really were useless. So please don't remove it because it may help others like me who don't know much about the subject.

It was created to provide a unifying look at temperature changes across all interesting time scales, and I believe that is a useful purpose. Dragons flight 06:00, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)

You might be right, but it can't possibly serve that purpose since there is no way to know what temperatures were before records were made. Something shouldn't be called a "record" when it isn't. --JonGwynne 06:49, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Obviously, many scientists believed there are ways to reconstruct temperature changes based on a variety of proxies. If you would prefer to call those "reconstructions" or something similar rather than "records", I might be willing to go along with that, but you seem to be arguing that there is no evidence (i.e. no record) of past temperature changes, and that simply isn't true. If you want to argue over semantics, please suggest an acceptable alternative. Dragons flight 06:59, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)

This is the problem, I don't think there is a single term that can encapsulate both actual records and inferences drawn from proxies - and some of the proxy choices are pretty dodgy... I mean, the idea of trying to extrapolate climate changes from tree rings?! Give me a break. But I digress... There are already articles in wiki that talk about the climate changes (documented and theorized) over various time spans, I don't see why this wholly redundant one is needed.--JonGwynne 07:10, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Personally, I'm quite happy to think of the one as "direct" temperature records and the other as "indirect" temperature records, and just call the whole thing "temperature records". In my opinion, someone reading about ice cores, sediments, and tree rings is unlikely to mistake the ancient records for direct thermometry. Since you don't seem to have a constructive suggestion in that regard, I don't see as how there is anything to be done about it. As far as whether the page has a right to exist, I think it does, and I am fairly sure that a variety of other people do too, but I can't stop you from listing it on VFD if you want to challenge that. Dragons flight 21:37, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)

(William M. Connolley 09:19, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)) JGs distinctions are specious. All T "records" are proxies, but some (thermometers) are more exact than others (d-o-18).

Do please explain how a direct record of temperature collected by the measurement of temperature by a thermometer is a "proxy". I'm most interested to hear your explanation.--JonGwynne 16:50, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

What is temperature JG? How does a thermometer work, (liquid based and bi-metallic)? Think about those two questions and figure it out :-) Vsmith 17:23, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

If you can't provide an answer, there is no reason to be rude.--JonGwynne 06:38, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I keep all my temperature records in the form of air samples in perfectly insulating containers. I found that sealed jars in the freezer stored the gas samples OK, but the temperature records were unreliable for some reason. (SEWilco 03:01, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC))

Does JG say that carbon dating is not a record of how old something is because one uses a proxy to calculate it? Science is the art of inferring from primary sources using artifical measures as proxies to represent a quality in a quantitative way (e.g temperature). JG's approach would mean there was no science. He needs to read more.

[edit] Please define "temperature anomaly"

All of the graphs plot the "temperature anomaly" but this term does not seem to be defined anywhere. I gather that it is the temperature with respect to some reference time period, but this should be explicitely explained (and perhaps linked to from the graphs, since they appear on multiple pages).

—Steven G. Johnson 18:07, 26 September 2006 (UTC)