Science and the pursuit of understanding is not something that is reserved only for scientists with advanced degrees and the resources that only a research institution can provide. Anyone can perform their own analysis on whether the Earth is warming or not, it is just a matter of knowing where to look.
I thought that it would be an interesting project to try to do a simple analysis of climate data using publicly available data (what a time to be alive!) on the subject. After looking at multiple datasets, I chose the GHCND (Global Historical Climatology Network Daily) dataset as it has many years of data from all around the globe. This blessing can be a curse as well though, The dataset downloaded is several gigs large, and uncompressed it is much, much larger than that, although, uncompressing it isn’t strictly necessary. If you want to look at other data sets though, Erika Wise has a great list to pick from.
This will be the first post in a series about a python program that I am developing to analyze climate data.