ON THE ABSURDITY OF AN AVERAGE TEMPERATURE OF PLANET EARTH

Critics, such as J. Cohler, argue that the concept of Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) is physically meaningless because temperature is an intensive property that cannot be averaged across non-equilibrium systems like Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. They contend that because there is no thermodynamic principle dictating how to average these temperatures, the choice of method (e.g., arithmetic vs. geometric mean) is arbitrary, rendering GMST a statistical artifact rather than a valid physical quantity.

From a measurement perspective, calculating GMST is limited by spatial heterogeneity and data gaps. Warming is not uniform; the poles warm faster than the tropics (polar amplification) and land warms faster than the ocean, meaning the global average masks regional extremes.

Furthermore, historical records suffer from coverage gaps, particularly in the Arctic and early periods, requiring interpolation and bias corrections for instrumentation changes (e.g., ship thermometers to satellites) that introduce uncertainty.

Studies indicate that GMST accounts for less than 20% of the variance in local surface air temperature on decadal timescales, as internal variability (such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation) and regional factors dominate local weather patterns.

📱 ROBINMG