Just How Hot Was 2010? | MND: Your Daily Dose of Counter-Theory

What I would really like to see is a good undergraduate level exposition on how global average annual temperatures are conducted: data sources, regions, what weights are given to what observations, what kind of “adjustments” are made and how they are made, what is done when data from a given day, or week, or month is missing — what substitutions are made for missing data — and other such factors. I’d be glad of a good book on “How to measure the temperature of the earth.” It need not be very complex. Just a narrative on why air temperatures are used instead of, say, the interior temperature of a given rock; do they use water temperatures or do they take the temperature of the air above the water; given use of air temperatures, what techniques are used, and what altitudes are chosen and why, and these are averages of what measures? I really don’t know how I would go about getting “the average annual temperature” of Los Angeles to any real accuracy for any given day, much less an average for the year. What about nights? Clear nights are a lot colder than cloudy nights. Do we make any kind of adjustment for cloud cover? Or do we take night temperatures “in the shade”, that is without exposing the instrument to the -270 radiant environment of the night sky? What do we shade it with? Is that a standard structure?