The Problem With Using Old Weather Reports to Track Climate Change

Relating that raw data to what’s happening today, though, is its own long and difficult process. On its website, the American Institute of Physics explains the history of climate studies this way: “The few pages of text and numbers were the visible tip of a prodigious unseen volume of work. One simple sentence (like ‘last year was the warmest year on record’) might be the distillation of the labors of a multi-generational global community. And it still had to be interpreted.”