Site, Cite, and Oversight

Anthony Watts has finally produced his long-awaited study showing that moving temperature gauges next to steam pipes, air conditioners, and asphalt — get this — changes the temperature trends.  As Anthony points out, there hasn’t been much serious criticism, and AGW proponents seem to be the only theorists in the world who spend vastly more time and energy defending poor methodologies than coming up with better ones.  It’s frankly comical that a team of unpaid volunteer skeptics had to do the real fieldwork of actually looking at the stations, something the tens of billions spent on climate science annually apparently couldn’t cover.

Propitious timing, as NOAA and environmental activists are desperately trying to avoid complying with Congressional oversight into whether politics is driving ever-higher surface data adjustments. This particular farce has gone beyond mere confirmation bias and entered the realm of Lysenkoism. Do they really not understand that billions of tax dollars come with certain legal strings attached? “Shut up and go away” is not an acceptable response to a Congressional subpoena.  The taxpayers paid for the scientists as well as the nonscientists whose government records they deigned to release. No oversight? Fine, no funding. Shut NOAA down until they comply.  Good luck in the private sector, folks.  One further hopes these savages either fully comply or end up in jail for obstruction, as their behavior is horribly corrosive to scientific integrity, the spirit of free inquiry, the principles of objectivity and reproducibility, and the rule of law.

NOAA released only what was nonresponsive to the inquiry into what role motivated reasoning and political bias may have played in the adjustments, questions that are totally reasonable given graphs like this and this and this even before the Watts study — and the best proxy might be Great Lakes ice: record extents and record late ice were reported during what non-adjusted weather stations reported as record cold, but NOAA reported the Great Lakes temps as about average.

In fact it’s gotten so ridiculous, conspiracy theorists like Scott K Johnson at Ars Technica (a cesspool of anti-science which quickly bans commenters who post dissenting links to actual science — the climatollahs will not entertain well-founded doubts about the wisdom of their jihad) seem to think ordinary government oversight is some sort of beyond-the-pale Inquisition, even as prominent Democrats and leftists are vocally trying to outlaw skepticism — not cut off funding (they already don’t get any), mind you, but actually put skeptics in jail for questioning climate change theories.

Hilariously, Scott tells us that “in the real world” the surface data is better than satellites, despite all the siting problems and the need to do spatial gridding, infilling, TOBs, and the fact they famously cannot even decide what the temperature was in July 1937 but have to change it every few months. Satellites by contrast require some calibration but they take orders of magnitude more measurements, across the height of the atmosphere, with much less instrument variation, and don’t have a ridiculously biased series of adjustments. And of course the warming models are supposed to predict atmospheric warming, not a massively adjusted data set of temperatures in poorly sited enclosures scattered across the surface.

The degree and speed with which inconvenient facts are now memory-holed by AGW proponents is breathtaking, it was not that long ago that the respective accuracies of satellites and surface stations was so uncontroversial NASA was calling for surface measurements to be abandoned.  I myself downloaded and wrote database scripts for the NCDC data a while back because I couldn’t believe Goddard’s claim that almost half of the data was now being fabricated, not measured. But it was true, 43% were marked as computer-generated, as anyone with modest programming skills can confirm for themselves. Naturally, the Democrats at Politifact then contacted and unquestioningly cited a geography (!) professor who self-righteously harrumphed that there was “no fabrication,” despite the fact the data is unambiguously marked as such, and added to their article a slew of additional misinterpretations favorable to Democrats, giving a perfect example of how the media covers AGW specifically and science in general.

Fortunately, we still live in the greatest country in the world, one where this kind of nonsense leads people to the reasonable conclusion that climate change is one of the least important issues of our time.


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9 responses to “Site, Cite, and Oversight”

  1. Gringo Avatar
    Gringo

    Those who have worked with getting measurements not in a lab, but out in the field, have by necessity become aware of the lack of precision of many measurements. Which is where the SWAG- scientific wild-assed guess- comes in.

  2. Man Mountain Molehill Avatar
    Man Mountain Molehill

    I’ve seen enough lab-based measurements that were “lacking precision” (way off, false to completely useless and bogus) not to trust much without a lot of verification. I can spend more time verifying the equipment and measurement technique than on the actual measurement.

  3. Scott Somerville Avatar
    Scott Somerville

    I’d love to know how many war it’s have beaten a speeding ticket by challenging the calibration of a government radar gun. You have to prove the instrument is right to take away an individual’s Liberty–but we’re taking away a whole planet’s liberties on the basis of measurements that are demonstrably unreliable.

  4. Steve Avatar
    Steve

    One reason the surface temperatures at many stations continue to rise is the use of NWS airport station data. Consider Dulles Airport in DC. Built 30 miles out in the Virginia farmlands 30 years ago, it is now surrounded on two sides by asphalt jungles of hotels, office complexes, residential communities and shopping centers. All that asphalt, concrete and shingles absorb sunlight more than grass and trees, causing heat sinks. Multiply the Dulles observations by hundreds of other airports in increasingly urban settings, and you have a significant skewing of temperatures, caused by changed surface absorption rates rather than atmospheric changes.

  5. John Moore Avatar
    John Moore

    Just a nit to pick… it should not be shocking that a geography professor was contacted – the meteorologists and climatologists are in the geography department at many universities.

  6. TBlakely Avatar
    TBlakely

    “I’d love to know how many war it’s have beaten a speeding ticket by challenging the calibration of a government radar gun.”

    Lol, many years ago I challenged a speeding ticket. The judge asked the policeman how often and by what means check the accuracy of his radar gun. The officer gave his rote response; he used a special tuning fork that when held in front of the gun and if it gave a reading that was within specification, the radar gun was considered calibrated and accurate.

    My response was; “How often do you check the tuning fork? If it is nicked or has suffered some other damage, it could vibrate at the wrong frequency and invalidate your calibration check.” Lol, both the policeman and judge who’d been running on auto-pilot paused, looked at me and then at each other. Apparently, nobody had asked that question before. 😛

    I was still found guilty but it was kinda fun throwing a temporary wrench in the pro-forma proceedings.

  7. Whitehall Avatar
    Whitehall

    Excellent post. I remember when the issue first floated up of the satellites telling a different story than the terrestrial stations. I was new to the issue (what – 2000?) and this point got me started in looking more deeply into the issue.

    The warmists had no good reason to ignore the satellite it turned out.

    Just one of the first tells that fraud stalked the planet.

  8. […] trend toward warming than surface temperatures, and no discernible warming since the late 1990s. Surface temperatures are subject to a number of controversial measurement issues making recent claims about “record warmth” […]