Pre-Industrial Baseline

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The pre-industrial baseline is the reference period against which contemporary global warming is measured, conventionally taken as the 1850 to 1900 average because that is roughly the earliest span with adequate instrumental coverage. Warming figures depend on which baseline is used, so the same month can be reported as 1.22°C above the twentieth century average and 1.38°C above the pre-industrial average, and contracts referencing temperature thresholds must specify both the baseline and the dataset. NOAA, NASA and Berkeley Earth each maintain their own global temperature series with somewhat different methods, and they can disagree enough to matter for whether a threshold is judged to have been crossed.

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