Climate Data Information

Generally speaking, as far as the earth’s water is concerned what goes up (evaporation) must come down (rainfall). One of the major tenets of the climate change community is that with global warming this might no longer be true: that with increasing temperatures more water will be held in the atmosphere. To quantify this requires accurate measure of the variables involved. I have in an earlier post looked at the decline in temperature measurement (a major determinant in what goes up). This post looks at rainfall where the situation is worse. First let me note that measuring rainfall has one important difference from measuring temperature. Rainfall is much more variable than temperature both temporarily and spatially. A significant depth of rain can fall in a few minutes. Most places on earth can sometimes go for days with no rain. Similarly, it can rain heavily on one side of town and a few kilometres away there be no rain at all. Getting an accurate estimate of rainfall over a given

Every year there is a meeting of national delegates of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The schedule was broken by COVID restrictions and no meeting was held in 2020. A couple of years ago I posted some comments on the meeting held in Poland in 2018 (http://www.climatedata.info/blogger/index.php?id=6854117018301138519). The last meeting to be held took place 2–13 December 2019 in Madrid, Spain During the previous meeting of the COP, 60 of the participating countries had no temperature stations in the GCHM (Global Historical Climatology Network) data base and only 15 of the 193 parties had more climate stations than members. In COP25 the equivalent numbers were 72 countries with no temperature stations and only 11 countries had more temperature station than delegates. So, in terms of data availability for assessing what was happening to the climate, the situation was clearly getting worse. Disturbing though these figures are, this is not what I want to