RE: Volume yesterday20 Jul 2025 13:17
Saved myself the typing, but you get the idea. Sit down, wannabe tough guy. This is over 👍
Yes, temperature is an intensive property—meaning it doesn't scale with the size of the system (unlike extensive properties like mass). But that doesn't mean you can't take meaningful averages of it. You can and do average intensive properties all the time when comparing like systems over space or time. Meteorology and climatology routinely use area-weighted or volume-weighted averages to produce spatially representative values, which are physically and statistically meaningful.
Your London–Aberdeen example is a strawman. No one claims the midpoint is 10°C—climate science doesn't work that way. Instead, temperature fields over the Earth's surface are gridded, weighted (often by area using latitude corrections), and then averaged to produce a global mean. This is mathematically and physically valid and robust.
Same with the tea-in-bucket analogy. That example applies to mixing systems, not to averaging measurements across space. Again, the global mean is not based on physically combining heat reservoirs—it's a spatial average of temperature data, derived from thousands of calibrated instruments and satellites.
As for thermometer siting, those biases are well-documented, monitored, and corrected for. This is why multiple independent datasets (NASA GISTEMP, HadCRUT, NOAA, Berkeley Earth) agree on global trends.
So yes, global average temperature is absolutely real, measurable, and meaningful. And it’s increasing—consistently and observably.
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