That is made even more true given that seventy one percent of the earth’s surface is ocean and the only ocean data prior to the satellite era which did not began until the late 1970’s was limited to ship routes mainly near land in the northern hemisphere. According to overseers of the instrumental temperature data, the Southern Hemisphere record is “mostly made up”. This is due to an extremely limited number of available measurements both historically and even presently from Antarctica to the equatorial regions.

This finding was amplified recently by MIT graduate Dr. Mototaka Nakamura in a 2020 book on “the sorry state of climate science” titled Confessions of a climate scientist: the global warming hypothesis is an unproven hypothesis.

He wrote: “The supposed measuring of global average temperatures from 1890 has been based on thermometer readouts barely covering 5 per cent of the globe until the satellite era began 40-50 years ago. We do not know how global climate has changed in the past century, all we know is some limited regional climate changes, such as in Europe, North America and parts of Asia.”

My philosophy when I taught meteorology and climatology in college was to show my students how to think – not what to think. As Socrates said, “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” I told my students that data is king, and models are only useful tools. Any model’s output or any theory needed to be examined and validated using data, and must always used with caution.

In 1978, the New York Times reported there was too little temperature data from the Southern Hemisphere to draw any reliable conclusions. The report, prepared by German, Japanese and American specialists, appeared in the Dec. 15 issue of Nature, the British journal and stated that “Data from the Southern Hemisphere, particularly south of latitude 30 south, are so meager that reliable conclusions are not possible,” the report says. “Ships travel on well-established routes so that vast areas of ocean, are simply not traversed by ships at all, and even those that do, may not return weather data on route.”

In 1981, NASA’s James Hansen et al reported that “Problems in obtaining a global temperature history are due to the uneven station distribution, with the Southern Hemisphere and ocean areas poorly represented,” – – – – (Science, 28 August 1981, Volume 213, Number 4511(link))

In 1989, the New York Times admitted the US data released from NOAA failed to show a warming trend since 1895. Even in 1999, the temperature still trailed 1934 – James Hansen noted “The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year 1934.”

Excerpts from published data by: