The Washington Post reports that the "lower 48" states of the USA are enjoying spring-like weather. It quotes a meteorologist as saying 1495 record high temperatures have been reached during the month of February (as against 10 record lows); among them:
[Ed Note: it is actually Mangum, OK, not Magnum. The original WaPo article is incorrect.]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday February 20 2017, @10:16PM
Well, the Chinese, Japanese and Indians have been keeping track of the weather for millenia. For other regions of the world, there are tree rings and ice cores giving us trends.
In the western world, people do need to check how precise the chemists did get with temperature measurements in the middle of the 19th century... This is not "20-30 years ago" stuff.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 20 2017, @10:32PM
people do need to check how precise the chemists did get with temperature measurements in the middle of the 19th century
I agree with the rest of your post at least more or less, but the chemists you list were not operating on an hourly basis in the middle of the Atlantic.
The HMS Challenger Expedition was kind of an anomaly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Challenger_(1858) [wikipedia.org]
It made the news recently, well, a decade ago, when the 50 volume book series of the expedition was available on line
http://www.19thcenturyscience.org/HMSC/HMSC-INDEX/index-linked.htm [19thcenturyscience.org]