Climate Change – Earth’s Temperature
Science typically starts with measurement. This is about the data that scientists around the world use to form judgments about climate change.
We will see how measurements are made and how they are assembled to characterize the climate of the entire earth. There is more than one type of temperature-measuring instrument in the climate scientist’s toolkit.
These include direct measurements such as thermometers on the earth’s surface, ships and buoys at sea, and balloons released into the atmosphere. Satellites in earth orbit currently are providing a much more comprehensive thermal profile of the earth’s surface and atmosphere.
Scientists also do detective work to investigate what the earth’s climate was like as far back as hundreds of thousands of years ago. We know that global warming is occurring because that is what the data shows.
