My favourite line in the original post is the first line:
"Global temperatures are dangerously close to the highest ever estimated to have occurred in the past million years, scientists reported Monday."
That immediately brought back some fond memories of my University days. Chem lab had us doing experiments on pH and charting the results. Those that took the time to do many small iterations had smoother line charts. And in the Materials Labs, where we looked at tensile strength of metal samples, the three samples that were tested using the machine's default setting produced consistently poor results. The next three samples, that had much smaller iterations in the increase in force applied, ended up showing the extra dip at the end of the elastic region. While you may not all understand this, the key point is that smaller iterations produced more precise results.
Another example is the Vostok ice cores. They calculated the temperature based on samples that were taken each meter. The charts that are available on the Internet show peaks and valleys. It is fairly consistent, but there is a problem. They only measured once each meter of depth. Each meter covered about 30 years near the top and 619 near the bottom. A lot can happen in 500 years. How do they know they found the true maximum? Sure they got fairly close, but it is indeed just an estimate of what the max is. An estimate. Now where did I see that word? Oh yes, in the first line of this post:
"Global temperatures are dangerously close to the highest ever estimated to have occurred in the past million years, scientists reported Monday."
Now this is from a news article, so it does not mention how the data was collected. If it was from ocean sediment, for example, then could further sampling have yielded a more accurate peak value? How accurate is the calculation for estimating the temperature? It is these questions that the news article does not address.
Does anyone have a link to the study, or at least the name of the study for which James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies was the study leader?
