Back in Chico, CA, local weatherman Anthony Watts is making big news in the global climate change discussion. Watts has been a fixture in the North State scene for many years, as broadcaster, renewable energy wonk, school board trustee, and lovable local crank.
He started investigating weather stations that are part of the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN), maintained by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). They provide the raw data that is used to calculate the increase in surface temperatures, at least in the US.
And some of them are poorly sited. The photo above is in Marysville, CA, and is improperly located near buildings, over asphalt, with several nearby sources of temperature distortion, including a metal cell tower, air conditioning exhaust vents, and a barbecue grill. The accompanying graph shows steadily increasing temperature readings.
This photo is of the monitoring station in Orland, properly sited away from structures, with no nearby sources of distortion. Those readings show steadily decreasing temperatures. These two sites are fifty miles apart.
Watts began disclosing these findings of his random sampling (about 50 of the over 1200 sites, so far) on his local blog "Watts Up With That", which were reported by some MSM outlets, picked up by Drudge, and earlier this week his little weather blog got tens of thousands of hits.
He launched another site to present his data and enlist support for collecting more data, but had to shut it down due to too much traffic. He has since relocated it to a more robust server, and is back on the net.
He's a true scientist, and so is cautious about projecting conclusions from the minuscule amount of data he's collected, but it's reasonable to expect that the data upon which so much of the global climate change projections are based were, literally, cooked.
Posted by Axon at June 22, 2007 8:56 AM | TrackBackCool.
Er, so to speak.
Posted by: rickl at June 22, 2007 8:01 PMI've been wondering about this for a while. Many years ago I walked down a paved walkway at night then cut across a lawn. I felt the ambient temperature drop at least two or three degrees. About that same time I noticed that city temperatures on the weather report were always warmer than "outlying" areas.
Also, how many times in the old days did the weather record keeper just decide that it was too hot or too cold to physically go check the thermometer and just wrote down the same number from yesterday or add or subtract a degree?
Posted by: Mumblix Grumph at June 22, 2007 8:33 PMGo to the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University (UK) and look at their plot of average global temperature. There hasn't been any increase in at least 10 years.
Posted by: Robert Sykes at June 23, 2007 6:54 AMGo to the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University (UK) and look at their plot of average global temperature. There hasn't been any increase in at least 10 years.
Posted by: Robert Sykes at June 23, 2007 6:54 AMThank you for showing that numbers do lie. I hope that your research on a true median global temperature will offer hope for our children and our children's children.
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