In studying climate, more measuring sites and longer records are always better, but that just means that you do the best job you can with the data you have.
It's ironic to hear Jim Z complain about Hansen being political--I can't imagine anyone being more political than Jim Z.
I think there are huge gaps. Alarmists argue that there are none or at least not enough to affect their certainty.
We really don't have a good history of climate from 2000 years to present. We have lots of proxies and make approximations but it is impossible to know if we are warmer or slightly cooler than a thousand years ago for example. This is quite important.
If our current temperature is well within historic norms, then maybe our CO2 emissions aren't really causing the warming or the amount of warming that alarmists insist humans have caused.
I don't know what we could do in the near future to change that. Our knowledge and technology grows all the time. It isn't really very helpful to science when we have people who are in charge of the data, i.e. Hansen, whose mission in life appeared to be political and it involved exaggerating AGW.
Our charts can handle gaps in data in different ways - display real gaps in the graphs, like in this sample, or, if you prefer not to have these gaps, the graph might connect data points. And even more - catrgory axis can simply omit the dates with no data. In this case all the spaces between data points will be equal, no matter if the dates go one by another or not.
If you mean weather data, then yes, there are massive gaps. To *really* understand the weather we would need data on temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind for every cubic inch if all the air all over the world at every altitude up to space. Clearly we don't have that much data.
There's a big gap in the climate research. They don't know much about cloud formation. They just spent $30 million on technical instruments to study them. It's a huge gap in climate science.
Geez Pegminer! Always attacking people? More childish behavior! This all started with a political agenda. You know the story with Margaret Thatcher. You even have a problem with the Royal Society (the ones she asked to prove CO2 causes global warming) in their assessment of climate change/global warming.
Having gaps in data is not too much of a problem as long as they are treated with respect not like below
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2014/...
cloud formation
If so, what is missing or incomplete, and how much does it matter?
And is anything being done, or planned for, to improve the data we have? ... to fill any gaps?
Or is the data more or less complete and anything new wouldn't make much difference?
