Sorry, you are simply plain wrong. There is nothing to "confuse" or "disentangle" here.

We are discussing an article stating that 2024 was the warmest year "since records began".

Somebody asks what "since records began" means in this context. This question is valid and pertinent. It also has just a single correct answer, and it has nothing to do with isotopes, ice ages or whatever happened in 1736 in Mannheim, Germany.

The answer, as I pointed out and linked to, is found expressly in the original press release of the organization which published this finding. As stated, the answer is: "Since records began" in this context means 1979-2024. Every other answer is factually incorrect.

Unfortunately, as is always the case with Internet discussions like these, the crowd which claims to have the facts and urges people to "follow the science" instead starts a debate which contains 0% facts and 100% ad hominem attacks.

None of this has anything to do, BTW, with the question of whether anybody involved in this debate thinks that climate change and its human-made causes are real and/or what could be done to combat it. We could be having a factual debate about the actually available underlying data - instead we once again see people either simply screeching "denier" or countering with largely fact-free arrogance.

Contrary to what people seem to think, this style of discussion does not contribute anything to the issue at hand, and it certainly does nothing to convince people who are actually in doubt or outright deniers. Rather, it is fuel to the fire for those who think that all climate science is made up and everybody can just claim whatever they want.

Tragic, really.

Provide the facts then. What is the time period referenced by "first full year on record"?

This is simply incorrect. According to Copernicus' own press release, the time period in question is 1979-2024:
https://climate.copernicus.eu/...

This is what "first full year on record" refers to.

The actual time period for which "first year" applies, however, is only betwen 1979 and 2024, i.e., a 45-year interval. This is clearly stated in Copernicus' own press release, upon which the reporting in the global press is based:
https://climate.copernicus.eu/...

The reference period for the average now exceeded by 1.5 degrees has been set as 1991-2020.

The underlying dataset, starting 1979, upon which many climate-related news stories have been based over the last few years is called "ERA5". Interestingly, ERA5 is not simply raw measurements but a post-processed "re-analysis" combining measurements and a climate model:
https://cds.climate.copernicus...

This re-analysis is also described as "data assimilation is a process whereby a model forecast is blended with observations to obtain the best fit to both the forecast and the observations":
https://confluence.ecmwf.int/d...

Make of this what you will, but the cited press release essentially states that according to their data, 2024 was the hottest year in the preceding 45-year interval, not since the last ice age, since the beginning of human history, or since industrialization began, as some people like to speculate. This is simply factually incorrect.

Sorry, but nope. The independent claims of US8407273B2 are clear and solve a technical problem. The application appears to revolve around the idea of adding statistical noise to computations in order to simulate analog computing, thereby enabling the useful exploitation of a large number of computational cores in parallel. A corresponding limitation is at least strongly implied in the claim features "repeated execution" and "statistical mean" and further underlined by the specified minimum percentages of affected inputs and relative deviation, even if (random) noise addition is not expressly specified.

Your mention of floating point numbers, which deviate from mathematical ground truth but in a deterministic manner - and even in a single operation without requiring repetition - is therefore irrelevant, as is your prior art.

Not sure what the actual state of the art is or should be in this case, but your argument appears to be based on a willful misreading of the claim language.

In any case, none of this matters for infringement proceedings, which only need to answer whether the technology practiced by the infringer falls within the scope of the claim. This yes/no answer should be fairly straightforward, since the claim scope per is clear.

Whether the patent is valid in the first place is a separate matter, but not nearly as clear-cut a case as you seem to think.

In any case, if you "have never seen patent claims as obnoxious as that", you clearly have not seem a lot of patent claims.

The very fact that anybody brings up LibreOffice shows that this is 100% amateur hour. Evidently the LiMux disaster has brought no shred to realism to the open source community when it comes to public administration. As somebody who has worked in the field for more than 10 years, let me tell you that VIRTUALLY NO ACTUAL WORK is done in public administration using ANY office software package. Almost all actual processes are performed using custom software, developed at the taxpayer's expense, which requires a completely specific environment to run.

Where I work, middle managers alone have access to around 100 field-specific applications (not a typo!). You see everything from decades-old scripts running on a mainframe terminal, over native software, complex Java application packages to more recent cloud-based applications. All of this is interlinked, subject to a myriad and ever-changing legal and procedural constraints, and highly optimized to facilitate staff members' everyday work tasks. Even moving from one Windows version to the next takes years of preparation and testing under laboratory conditions before roll-out to ensure that all pieces to the puzzle keep working.

OS and office software license fees are entirely neglibile compared to the development and maintenance costs of the countless specialized in-house applications. As I said, except maybe for the secretary of the boss, virtually nobody uses any sort of office package as substantial part of their daily work. Anybody who proposes to migrate tens of thousands of government computers to open source / Linux because "LibreOffice works" has absoultely no clue what they are talking about. Absolutely no clue.