Cooking up global warming...

A nice overview of the problems related to the management and location of stations measuring temperature in the US....

Recently, evidence increasingly made its way to people who pay attention to such things that that our network’s reliability was not all that it was cracked up to be, that there just might be misplacement of measurement instruments enhancing a mild warming trend begun in the late 1970s that otherwise seems to have stopped. Now, a full-blown scandal is erupting, exposing the expensive U.S. surface measurements as quite possibly not much more than yet another tool in the global warming alarmists’ kit to frighten taxpayers into accepting a radical eco-lifestyle agenda.

he importance of network standards and accuracy emerged as a concern after economics professor Ross McKitrick charted a dramatic, worldwide closure of fully one-half of the planet’s surface temperature measurement stations from 1989-91. Those closures -- and the limitation of data that resulted -- resulted in a statistical artifact -- the “hottest decade ever!” according to agenda-driven alarmists -- of an apparent jump in global surface temperatures in the 1990s. Not a warming trend, mind you, but a sudden shift upward. As it turns out this in all likelihood is simply a product of having closed thousands of cold-weather latitude stations, at a time when for example the Soviets/Russians found themselves with bigger things to worry about than maintaining Siberian thermometers, such as a collapsing empire.

So the enterprising Dr. Watts, a TV and radio meteorologist, began taking a closer look here at home. Watts put out a call for individuals to photograph each of America’s 1221 surface stations. As the first snaps came in Watts noticed a preponderance of ridiculously sited temperature apparatuses which common sense would dictate factored in a warming bias among the U.S. network (which, remember, is the world’s least unreliable).

It seems fair to conclude that siting thermometers in Arizona parking lots, overhanging black asphalt pads, near cell towers and hot-air blowing air conditioner exhausts or next to trash burn barrels has to result from either a complete breakdown of scientific discipline or an intent to skew the data to produce evidence of global warming.

But what can you say about setting one just away from a chimney directly above a Weber barbecue grill? That’s just what they did in Hopkinsville, KY. These practices would be hilarious if they didn’t result in large amounts of corrupted data upon which our policymakers desperately seek to base an energy scarcity regime.