Gradually Sinking In . . .

Errors, Errors Everywhere

We have posted several times on the implications of inaccurate, massaged, and manufactured global temperature data. It completely undercuts the integrity of scientific claims for evidence of global warming.

Now, it seems that the implications are starting to dawn on some of the editorial and feature writers in the main stream media, as a recent editorial in the Washington Times attests.

EDITORIAL: More errors in temperature data


Yvo de Boer, the United Nations' top climate-change official, announced his resignation yesterday. Good riddance. The bureaucrat's departure is no surprise because his pseudo-scientific global warming religion was proved to be a hoax on his watch.

The list of problems central to the global warming fraud just doesn't seem to end. As if hiding and losing data, the numerous errors in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the suppression of academic research that disagrees with global warming weren't bad enough, now comes word that basic ground-based temperature data may have been biased towards incorrectly showing temperature increases.

Joseph D'Aleo, the first director of meteorology and co-founder of the Weather Channel, and Anthony Watts, a meteorologist and founder of SurfaceStations.org, are well-known and well-respected scientists. On Jan. 29, they released a startling study showing that starting in 1990, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began systematically eliminating climate-measuring stations in cooler locations around the world. Eliminating stations that tended to record cooler temperatures drove up the average measured temperature. The stations eliminated were in higher latitudes and altitudes, inland areas away from the sea and more rural locations. The drop in the number of weather stations was dramatic, declining from more than 6,000 stations to fewer than 1,500.

Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Watts provide some amazing graphs showing that the jumps in measured global temperature occurred just when the number of weather stations was cut. But there is another bias that this change to more urban stations also exacerbates. Recorded temperatures in more urban areas rise over time simply because more densely populated areas produce more heat. Combining the greater share of weather stations in more urban areas over time with this urban heat effect also tends to increase the rate that recorded temperatures tend to rise over time.

Unfortunately, all three terrestrial global-temperature data sets (by NOAA/National Climatic Data Center, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the University of East Anglia) really rely on the same measures of surface temperatures. These three sources do not provide independent measures of how the world's temperatures have changed over time. The relatively small differences that do arise from these three institutions result from how they adjust the raw data.

The findings by Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Watts also explain some puzzles that have bothered researchers. For example, land-based temperatures have been rising while satellite-based measures haven't shown the same increase since 1990. Their answer is that at that point in time, the elimination of weather stations produced a false measured increase in temperatures that didn't affect the satellite readings. There is no evidence (yet) that this effort was consciously designed to increase recorded temperatures, but that is beside the point. The crux of the matter is that fanatics about man-made global warming want to spend trillions of dollars based on conclusions from faulty data.

As the frigid winter days pass and the scandals mount, it becomes clear that claims of man-made global warming aren't based on scientific methods at all. The hysteria is based on fraud.

A recent article in the Times Online also reported on the growing scepticism about the reliability of the temperature record.

February 14, 2010
World may not be warming, say scientists
Jonathan Leake

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said

Whenever warming alarmists assert that temperatures are rising we must continue to ask, How do you know? Satellite temperature data are by far and away the most reliable--but we have a relatively short run series since satellites are a relatively new invention. Global land based temperature data is a mess. It is possible that the raw can be recovered to some extent and the survivorship, warming bias stripped out--but even then, it is unlikely to be sufficiently robust from which to derive highly probable, reliable scientific conclusions.