I would have to divide the responsibility for this disagreement between Dolphinhead and Judith. Dolphinhead is wrong for thinking that temperature itself matters, and I think Judith could have been clearer about why it doesn’t.
Temperature doesn’t matter because whatever it is, we’ve learned to live with it.
What matters is temperature variation. If it varies only a little we can probably live with that too. It’s when it varies a lot that it becomes problematic.
Dolphinhead criticized Argo as follows:
For Argo buoys, we have ocean water. That’s a little bit better. But we still have surface evaporation (so that temperature does not serve as a good proxy for heat at the surface as some left via evaporation),
This is a reasonable criticism if the goal is to measure temperature. But if the goal is to measure temperature variation it is not, since the heat leaving via evaporation is about the same this week as it was a billion weeks ago.
One measurement suffices when measuring temperature. But if you want to know about temperature variation you can’t get by with fewer than two measurements.
The fact that HADCRUT and GISTEMP give only anomalies should be a big hint that temperature is irrelevant and only its variation matters.