Watts Up With That?

The Oregonian posted this news story below of a new high temperature of 108 being set in Brookings, OR under “breaking news”. The town newspaper, the Curry Coastal Pilot, had this breathless front page story along with a picture of the bank thermometer, even though they have their own weather station downtown.

Only one problem; the temperature is measured at the airport. The official USHCN  station closer to the coast read differently. I called the Medford NWS Forecast Office and inquired. These are the numbers for high temperatures on July 8th, 2008:

Brookings Airport ASOS 108°F
Brookings USHCN COOP station 90°F
Curry Coastal Newspaper Office 108°F
Agrimet station 107°F
Crescent City, CA  68°F (28 miles south)

Now compare the location of the USHCN station with that of the airport ASOS station, the newspaper office, and with the wind direction that day:

Click for a larger image

As they say in real estate, “location is everything”. In this case the USHCN station appeared to be away from the “Brookings Effect” that is often seen when a north wind blows from the mountains through town.

UPDATE: Here is the data from the Brookings ASOS at the airport:

Click for full sized image

I wonder which temperature will be used for the new “official” high for the town in the NCDC records? The USHCN station, or the airport?

Brookings hits 108 record high Tuesday, hits 102 today

by Stuart Tomlinson and Helen Jung, The Oregonian July 09, 2008 18:15PM Read the rest of this entry »

From Andrew Bolt at the Herald Sun:

PSYCHIATRISTS have detected the first case of “climate change delusion” – and they haven’t even yet got to Kevin Rudd and his global warming guru.

Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children’s Hospital say this delusion was a “previously unreported phenomenon”.

“A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events.”

(So have Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery, Profit of Doom Al Gore and Sir Richard Brazen, but I digress.)

“The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies.”

But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What’s scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this “climate change delusion”, too.

Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: “If we do not begin reducing the nation’s levels of carbon pollution, Australia’s economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands.”

And here is a senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist aghast at the horrors described in the report on global warming released on Friday by Rudd’s guru, Professor Ross Garnaut: “Australians must pay more for petrol, food and energy or ultimately face a rising death toll . . .”

Wow. Pay more for food or die. Is that Rudd’s next campaign slogan?

Of course, we can laugh at this — and must — but the price for such folly may soon be your job, or at least your cash.

Rudd and Garnaut want to scare you into backing their plan to force people who produce everything from petrol to coal-fired electricity, from steel to soft drinks, to pay for licences to emit carbon dioxide — the gas they think is heating the world to hell. Read the rest of this entry »

REPLY: Go for it. I’m jammed up today, fires are threatening again. 1/4 mile visibility due to smoke.

Added reference: A number of comments ask why the historical numbers change. I wrote a post on that earlier this year, which was publicized on this blog and Climate Audit. I am not saying it is OK that they change, only describing why they change.