'Since records began': a brief guide to who's taking the temperature
Stories about climate change are frequently accompanied by the phrase 'since records began'. But whose records and when did they begin?
The oldest ongoing instrumental record of temperature in the world is the , started in 1659. But it wasn't until the mid-19th century that we started to take the temperature 'globally', and not until 1873 and the foundation of the that we all started to try and take the temperature in the same way.
By global temperature, at this time we mean predominantly Europe, bits of the then-British Empire (India, Australia, South Africa) and North America. It's probably fair to say that . (See diagram.)
This map shows the 7,280 fixed-temperature stations in the catalogue, colour-coded by the length of the available record. (Created for .)
To this day, we still rely on a basic network of . But the sophistication and ambition of climate monitoring has literally sky-rocketed in the last 20 years, not least with the European Space Agency's Earth Explorers programme.
So there you have it. When someone says 'since records began', they probably mean 'since about 1880'.
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