TELLING IT LIKE IT IS !

We keep hearing that the global temperature dramatically increased in the last century. But what does “global temperature” mean, and how reliable are the readings?

Global temperature is measured through thousands of stations located throughout the world. The continental United States itself has 1,221 such measuring points, and supposedly they are among the most reliable in the world. But how reliable are they? Anthony Watts, blogger of Watts Up With That, took it upon himself (and a group of more than 650 volunteers) to find out the reliability. They examined 70% of the stations and the results are nothing short of stunning.

They found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. They found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.

In fact, they found that 89% of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own location requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source. In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.

It gets worse. They observed that changes in the technology of temperature stations over time, also has caused them to report a false warming trend. There were major gaps found in the data records that were filled in with data from nearby sites, a practice that propagates and compounds errors. They also found that adjustments to the data by both NOAA and NASA caused recent temperatures to look even higher. Why measure if you are going to change the results? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of measuring? And these are supposed to be among the more reliable temperature readings in the world! Here is a file of the entire report. Read it and decide for yourself if you can trust that temperature data.

The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.

So with ground temperature data now revealed as unreliable, what do we know? Satellite Data indicates that the earth warmed from the period of 1979 to around 1998, and that it has cooled since 2002. That is 19 years of warming, and at least 7 years of cooling … and very little else that we know for certain. On the basis of this, countries around the world have instituted disastrous and business-damaging programs like carbon taxes or cap-and-trade programs. Very soon the United States will consider the Waxman-Markey bill, which would enact a cap and trade program to tax us on what we exhale after ever breath we take in. They tell us the science is settled … on what? … flawed data!

And finally, Richard Henry Lee at the American Thinker Blog asks perhaps the most important question to arise from this discovery: “But the real question is why it took a dedicated group of volunteers to find the numerous faults in our temperature record rather than the heavily funded governmental and educational institutions which are continually warning us about global warming.”

That one isn’t hard to answer … those institutions, seeing their coffers fill up with each doomsday prediction, simply didn’t care to look.