To MarkW, I hope I was seeing sarcasm when it, to me sounded like you were chastising folks “don’t question the science here”. There is a very legitimate time and place for anyone to say … HUH? (with a big question mark).

Second, to all the apologists who are suggesting we need to know about where and when and how things were placed (like lets not jump to conclusions with the recent phtotos etc.), the fact remains.

If you are to be considered credible in claims of the magnitude we now see in the global warming argument, then you must insist on non-biased data … and if that is not possible because of “historical” or other reasons … then you must ignore completely such data.

I postulate that with the daily increasing panic of something we are not certain is happening, we ought to be daily monitoring truly accurate recordings.

And, although we get more crowded every day, with the technology we have there is no excuse to not have totally isolated sensors.

Sorry, long rant. But I promise I will only be here once in a while!
Rick

I checked your SurfaceStations site, and didn’t see any results from Nevada. I know a guy who writes for a political blog who lives in Las Vegas and is quite interested in the GW issue. I’ve linked to your site in posts on his blog in the past, but I’ll run it by him again, along with this article, in an email.

In the meantime, “we” clearly need to “DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING”, or we’re all doomed, heh, heh. Perhaps we should heed the advice in the last paragraph of the article:

“Nevadans are starting to understand that global warming is affecting us right now, and that our elected officials need to start making some tough choices to protect our quality of life,” said Kyle Davis, the Policy Director for the Nevada Conservation League and a member of the Governor’s Climate Change Task Force.

Our “elected officials” do such a great job of solving all our other problems, global warming should be a piece of cake.

I agree that the photos have a multitude of uses beyond documenting the site at a particular moment in time. I suspect most of those throwing stones are doing so because they can’t argue with the central point, i.e. NOAA says the USHCN is a collection of high-quality sites, NOAA has specific siting guidelines, large numbers of the sites don’t meet the guidelines. It really is that simple. As an added complication, virtually all of the documented deviations from the site guidelines would introduce a positive bias in the temperature record.

No I’m not in the business of temperature analysis on these sites, since that would take permissions and resources I don’t have access to. Remember this is a zero-budget project don entirely out of pocket and with the help of volunteers.

Right now we are concentrating on siting compliance.

Perhaps later we can do follow up studies.

Read on and you will see that the article waxes in passionate defense of Anthony Watts.

They (the Paradise Post) never even contacted me to ask a question, and that statement about Mann is obviously wrong. I think he meant to write Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.

http://www.paradisepost.com/columns/ci_6445069

“Working with Penn State climatologist Dr. Michael Mann, Watts found most of the problems were in urban areas where temperatures are allegedly on the rise.”

Working with Michael Mann?

Some photos beg to have questions answered. For example, a station may be located near a recently-constructed building or road. Where was the station located during the construction? What did the site look like prior to construction? If you have ever gone back to see your childhood home I am sure you were amazed by how much things changed since you left there. The same can be true of these stations.

NOAA apparently had site curators photograph their stations a few years back and send them in to the agency. It would be interesting to compare those photos with the ones being collected today. That would certainly yield a valuable data point in understanding the effect of siting.

Cool t-shirt sighting. “Al Gore didn’t invent the internet, but he DID make up global warming”.