  We estimate the effect of the experimental uncertainty in the measurement of
the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) on the extraction of
cosmological parameters from future CMB surveys. We find that even for an ideal
experiment limited only by cosmic variance up to l = 2500 for both the
temperature and polarisation measurements, the projected cosmological parameter
errors are remarkably robust against the uncertainty of 1 mK in the FIRAS
instrument's CMB temperature monopole measurement. The maximum degradation in
sensitivity is 20%, for the baryon density estimate, relative to the case in
which the monopole is known infinitely well. While this degradation is
acceptable, we note that reducing the uncertainty in the current temperature
measurement by a factor of five will bring it down to the per cent level. We
also estimate the effect of the uncertainty in the dipole temperature
measurement. Assuming the overall calibration of the data to be dominated by
the dipole error of 0.2% from FIRAS, the sensitivity degradation is
insignificant and does not exceed 10% in any parameter direction.
