All Your Weather Base Are Belong To Us
MichaelW on Jun 18 2007 at 10:30 pm | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Environment, MichaelW's Page, Religion and theology
“Kyoto, we have a problem.”
Few things annoy me more than the modern Lysenkoism of Anthropogenic Global WarmingTM and its rapturous congregation who viciously condemn any who dare challenge their scriptures. Each day it seems that we are bombarded with yet more bald-faced propaganda designed to scare us (and especially our children) into submission to the will of the environmental elite. These mullahs of climate change brook no dissension amongst their ranks, and harbor no compunction against destroying their enemies, by whatever means necessary. The Grand Imam himself jets around the world, in seeming hypocrisy, to deliver the message that the planet is doomed at the hands of evil capitalist oppressors unless we submit to the daily regimen prescribed for us at the site of his own personal Night Flight, and embodied in the Kyoto Protocol.
But lately, it seems, the dissenting voices have grown stronger. More and more scientists are speaking up about the corrupted process that went into the IPCC report on climate change, the infamous Stern Report was rather openly challenged, and “An Inconvenient Truth” was widely panned. Huzzah! I say. “It’s about time,” says I. Not that I have any real doubt that the Earth is getting warmer, but I’m not at all confident that humans can, much less are, causing said warming. And then today I read that, perhaps, we aren’t even warming:
Remember in January when the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its good friends in media trumpeted that 2006 was the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States?
NOAA based that finding – which allegedly capped a nine-year warming streak “unprecedented in the historical record” – on the daily temperature data that its National Climatic Data Center gathers from about 1,221 mostly rural weather observation stations around the country.
Few people have ever seen or even heard of these small, simple-but-reliable weather stations, which quietly make up what NOAA calls its United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN).
But the stations play an important role in detecting and analyzing regional climate change. More ominously, they provide the official baseline historical temperature data that politically motivated global-warming alarmists like James Hansen of NASA plug into their computer climate models to predict various apocalypses.
The information gathered from those 1,221 weather observation bases provide the basis for claiming that the Earth is warming, and according to the AGM faithful, at an alarming rate. According to people like Hansen, these weather stations “have been providing reliable temperature data since at least 1900.”
But Anthony Watts of Chico, Calif., suspects NOAA temperature readings are not all they’re cracked up to be. As the former TV meteorologist explains on his sophisticated, newly hatched Web site surfacestations.org, he has set out to do what big-time armchair-climate modelers like Hansen and no one else has ever done – physically quality-check each weather station to see if it’s being operated properly.
To assure accuracy, stations (essentially older thermometers in little four-legged wooden sheds or digital thermometers mounted on poles) should be 100 feet from buildings, not placed on hot concrete, etc. But as photos on Watts’ site show, the station in Forest Grove, Ore., stands 10 feet from an air-conditioning exhaust vent. In Roseburg, Ore., it’s on a rooftop near an AC unit. In Tahoe, Calif., it’s next to a drum where trash is burned.
Watts, who says he’s a man of facts and science, isn’t jumping to any rash conclusions based on the 40-some weather stations his volunteers have checked so far. But he said Tuesday that what he’s finding raises doubts about NOAA’s past and current temperature reports.
“I believe we will be able to demonstrate that some of the global warming increase is not from CO2 but from localized changes in the temperature-measurement environment.”
You have to see the pictures to understand exactly how useless some of the stations appear to be, such as this one surrounded by asphalt and air conditioners.
Those of you who approach this story with a libertarian bent, will of course have no problem understanding how such incompetence could be allowed not only to form the basis of scientific studies but to also be one of the driving forces behind AGM and the draconian policies being pushed by its adherents.
What will be really interesting is to see how this is explained away by Al Gore and his disciples. Will they loudly shout down and seek to excommunicate the whistle-blowers in this story (much like the slanderous machinations used against Bjørn Lomborg), or will they studiously ignore the challenge, chalking it up to radical skeptics (as was done to those who pointed to flaws in the famous “Hockey Stick” graph)? Whatever is done, if the crux of this story is true in that the temperatures relied upon to demonstrate a dramatic heating of the Earth are completely unreliable, then we may yet see the remaining pillars holding up the science of AGM collapse beneath the Gorites like brittle ice from under the feet of castaway polar bears.
It will be sweet.
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The View From the Bluff: Lance’s Economic and Finance Blog
Sorry to be off-topic, but where did you find the mad scientist graphic?
Thanks,
Sean
Sean:
Same place you did: Google.