Faulty data and global warming...

We've covered Anthony Watts before, but here's a little piece from Arizona..

That's where the skeptics speak up. Among doubters, at least three camps have emerged: people who accuse researchers, journalists and others of conspiring to spread bad science about climate change; people who recognize rising temperatures but dispute man's ability to disrupt the Earth's natural cycles; and people, like Meyer, who may accept some ideas about climate change but believe scientists leapt too far and reached unsupported conclusions.

"There was a guy in 1900 who declared that science was over and we'd learned everything," Meyer said. "I think it would be unusual in science to have the code cracked in 20 or 30 years. The topic is complicated."

Meyer saw what he thought were weaknesses in the various models used to link the increase in greenhouse-gas emissions and the projected rise in temperature. He was also bothered by how little new data the scientists used.

"They were building in more and more details, but it's not clear the models are getting better," he said.

Meyer found a whole community of people who shared his concerns. One of them was Anthony Watts, a former TV meteorologist who says serendipity and some white paint drew him into the climate-change debate.

Watts, who now runs his own weather-data service in Chico, Calif., started an experiment examining whether the type of paint used on the boxes that housed weather-monitoring equipment could skew temperature readings. He discovered that the boxes had bigger problems than their covering.

He found weather stations sitting in parking lots, next to air-conditioning units, on surfaces likely to reflect heat upward. He posted his early findings on the Internet and sought volunteers to help him document the thousands of weather stations nationwide.

Earlier this year, with photos and descriptions of about one-third of the stations, he presented his conclusions to scientists in Colorado. Watts said he believes poorly maintained weather stations have inflated temperatures by 1 to 5 degrees centigrade. That could account for the temperature rise attributed to global warming.

"If we are, in fact, warming the Earth due to human causes, we need to get to the real root of it," Watts said. "Is it carbon dioxide, is it a combination of that and faulty data, or is it faulty data alone?"