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Weather station data is used for most of the global temperature datasets and most of that is records of daily maximums and minimums. Looking at such records was one of the ways to determine whether we have been experiencing climate change and the reason most datasets start from the late 1800's. Ships also provide temperature data used for temperatures over oceans. Homogenization is done to make data in a variety of formats compatible with each other and to remove sources of bias such as different and changing weather station technology, shifting of sites and my understanding is some datatsets preference nearby rural stations over urban ones where urban heat island appear to make a bias. Comparing nearby stations that experience similar weather and temperatures is one way of identifying problem stations. Usually they divide the world up into smaller areas and average the stations within each before going on to make a global average from those - this is to compensate for some regions having a lot of weather stations and other having few; simply averaging all the weather stations together would distort the results by making it an average of the places with the most stations rather than truly global. The addition of satellite data provides consilience - ie shows much the same result by other means and affirms them, but it is even more reliant on processing the data, by means that are opaque to the non-expert.

First day at school My kettle just died RIP boiling water You will be mist

I wrote app for smartphone to send light signals if you want to spread it to the entire Universe, so any alien spiece will be warned already.. 😛

Thank you for this reply and the other posts you have recently made. I hope I am now clear on your input and can now discuss it further. 🙂 +1 I'll come back to 'value' in the context of your introduction of 'objective v subjective' in a moment. But first your use of relativity and relationship, although these words stem from the same root, they have different meanings and usage. Even though you are not a mathematician, you should be easily able to understand the very basic concept of 'relationship' in mathematics and logic. Like so many basic concepts in so many subjects 'relationship' manifests itself as having many shades of meaning. The are many types of relationship recognised. In fact it is a broad category and we distingusih further by either introducing special new words (as in function) or additional adjectives as in equivalence relation. You might find it useful to look at your own language wiki to find out about a particularly useful one in maths called an equivalence relation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_relation Here you can see that in this type of relation you can sometimes substitute one 'value' for another - there is no subjectivity allowed according to the rules. So subjective v objective. I hear what you say about this but Nature (Physics, maths, everything) is remarkably obstinate in resisting Man's efforts to squeeze it into his own subjective categorisations. And so it is with subjective v objective. This is not an either or (binary) choice, but rather a scale of meaning. Science, in particular, tries to remain objective by various means. We like to think that if se set up a machine to observe and/or record it is objective because it can only record what it observes. But I know that Nature can play tricks on us, from my own personal experience during my time as a surveyor. When making important verticular angular measurements it is good practice to observe from both ends of the observation line. One end will generally be below the other so looking up (+ve angle) and the other end looking down (-ve) angle. But I have seen situations where it is possible for both angles to be +ve. That is both ends of the line appear to be looking down on the other. The angular measurement instrument (theodolite) is correct (objective) and it is not operator error. So Science is able to correct its faulty theory.

It may be difficult to tie a single event to climate change, much like you can’t tell for sure that seatbelts saved a life in certain accidents. But it becomes clearer when you look at the statistics of all the events.

OK. But it will not matter to NASA, when they search for life on Mars. They already know that there are atoms on Mars. It will also not matter, for example, to an agency that gives grants for research of living organisms. Atoms are not living organisms in their definition.

You still did not answer, what is the point. You can just decide that it is a living organism. Nobody will care.

For which purpose?

But definition depends on the purpose. What is it going to be used for? Or, when? Where?