Paper and Other Absolute Truths Providing Analysis and Perspective Uncommon in Mainstream Media

Disagreement over temperature trends is central to the entire debate.  Some global warming advocates claim that the earth has continued to warm in the ‘00s, but you have to selectively choose how to measure temperature to arrive at that conclusion – more on this, and specifically NASA, at another time. Most non-climate scientists, such as Professor Carter, the author of our Blog’s Weekly Feature, agree that temperatures peaked in 1998 and have been trending lower since then.

It is growing more obvious, however, that fraud is another major reason for global temperature disagreements. New revelations of fraud and misapplication of the scientific method are being reported virtually every day in the mainstream media. 

It is interesting that authors of these newspaper and magazine stories always emphasize that the fraudulent acts have no bearing on the established fact of global warming. In other words, we know global warming is a fact, so don’t be confused by trivial data issues such as, “Is the global temperature really increasing?” 

These writers might want to just stop and think for a minute about the dynamics of what is taking place.  Why would scientists intentionally distort the data so that it was consistent with global warming theory?  If it were not important, they would not have lied. If it did not make a difference, they would not have risked their careers.  The devil is in the details, and in this case the details are the data.

Two stories are linked in this post.  In the first, Phil Jones of Climategate infamy, and a Chinese scientist (Wei-Chyung Wang) claimed in a 1990 paper that urban growth around temperature stations had little impact on reported temperatures.  In other words, their conclusion was that higher temperatures being reported had virtually nothing to do with the fact that cities in China had been built up around the temperature stations. Since that paper was published, other scientists have carried out studies that resulted in quite different conclusions. (This urban warming factor, by the way, significantly distorts the magnitude of global warming).

When this study was challenged by an amateur scientist (the professionals were apparently uninterested), we learned that the data was both manipulated, and “lost”.  Imagine how damming the lost data would have been, considering how poor the “found” data was.

And when, in 2007, Jones finally released what location data he had, British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud.

He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the story period, perhaps invalidating their data.

Keenan told the Guardian: “The worst case was a station that moved five times over a distance of 41 kilometres”; hence, for those stations, the claim made in the paper that “there were ‘few if any changes’ to locations is a fabrication”. He demanded that Jones retract his claims about the Chinese data.

You can access the full story at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/01/dispute-weather-fraud

I find the second story even more egregious, because it implies some level of conspiracy on the part of U.S.climate-scientists. 

One way to make sure temperatures around the world are increasing is to stop taking temperature readings where it is cold. This following story was printed in the Vancouver Sun, Scientists Using Selective Temperature Data, Skeptics Say. Two scientists claim,

…U.S. government scientists have skewed global temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada.

In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.

…Worse, only one station — at Eureka on Ellesmere Island — is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.

…Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have “cherry picked” the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea — which has a warming effect on winter weather.

…Using the agency’s own figures, Smith shows that in 1991, almost a quarter of NOAA’s Canadian temperature data came from stations in the high Arctic. The same region contributes only 3% of the Canadian data today.

It has become clear that the foundation of global warming theory rests on data distortion.