I eagerly accept that we do not know what we don't know. You accept that we know what we don't know.

How did my thread, which was about salt intake, stumble into AGW and Obamacare? That's all I want to know. ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

I tried to swing it back around by bringing up the coefficient of expansion of sea water being affected by its level of salinity...

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

I don't know about the first sentence, but your second sentence is untrue.

I'm gonna' go all Rumsfeld on you :-)

There are "known unknowns" in science; things we can't put an exact number on but we can estimate to a certain degree, and decide on whether they are worthy of further investigation. Like in the last big thread on this - there was a guy saying that sea level measurements couldn't possibly be right if they didn't include the displaced volume of ships (http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...ost=6198219#p6198219). So what scientists do in a case like this is try to figure out if that's something you need to look at (in this case no, it's negligible).

What you may be missing is that the lithosphere is very elastic on the scale of ocean basins; changes in ocean basin volume due to earthquakes and tectonic forces are fairly readily accounted with that in mind. There's a good summary paper here that does a good job of explaining isostasy and eustasy: https://www.researchgate.net/...ea-Level-Changes.pdf

You were born in 1970. You have no idea what people were told in the 70s. You are buying someone else's lie.

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I'm beginning to think that we are much more fucked than I thought.

Right, because no oceanographer ever thought of that or accounted for it.

Do you need some pink font, or would you rather just google on "steric sea level rise". Just right-click and go ...

Riiiiiggghhhhht.

We've always been at war with Eastasia.

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

Read this entire post from the very top. Make sure you include the quoted sections in your reading.

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

Don't worry, I got your attempt at a joke the first time.

Duffy, I actually have to thank you. You prompted me to read a bit last night about how historical temperatures were taken, both on land and in the oceans, and I learned quite a bit. I didn't know that in 1853 there was an international effort undertaken to make sure all ocean readings were taken in the same ways in an attempt to standardize the readings. And while you're right that very often a bucket was used, there were other ways as well, including pressurized thermometers. All fascinating.

So the question comes down to this: If we're trying to understand if something is happening to global temperatures, what do we do about historical readings that were taken with less rigor than we're currently using?

We could toss them out and rely only on measurements from say from 1980 on, which is a valid argument (those temps show an increasing trend as well). But it's of tremendous value to be able to see a trend from as far back as possible, so it makes sense to try to derive some value from historical readings. That's what some climate scientists focus most of their waking lives trying to do. Sure, readings from 1850 aren't going to be a accurate as a reading taken today, but 1,000 readings, taken by different people using slightly different means, in aggregate, can yield useful information. For instance - if 1,000 readings were taken in a year where the actual ocean temperature was equal to today's, you'd expect to find them clustering somewhat around today's average. Instead, we see them clustering slightly lower.

Think of it this way. Those scientists are not idiots. If you were tasked with trying to make as much sense as possible from those historic readings, you'd figure out a lot of ingenious ways to correct for the errors and inconsistencies you'd find. (In this ship's log it says they use a wooden bucket. This other ship also uses a wooden bucket, but they shield it from the wind when doing the reading to make sure the air doesn't cool the water in the wood. The first ship didn't do that, and their readings are consistently 0.5 degrees cooler in the same areas. You'd be smart and weight the value of those two ships' readings accordingly.)

If you want to believe bloggers and politicians can see big, obvious holes in a science that the scientists themselves have never seen or dealt with, you'll have to come up with some evidence to back it up.