I was surprised to learn today, that one of the most prominent newspapers in the USA, the Orange County Register in the Los Angeles area, carried an editorial of which my work was the subject. It is quite a turnaround from the brush off I got last year by their Science Dude blogger who wrote a story on the warming of Santa Ana, CA.
By the way here is what the official NOAA weather station for Santa Ana looks like, note the a/c heat exchanger exhausts:
Santa Ana Station looking North. Click for a larger image
The editorial about my work was published in the OC Register on Monday, June 1st. I’ve reposted it below.
Editorial: Cooling down with global-warming data
U.S. and world temperature records are compromised by monitoring station errors.
If fighting global warming may cost the economy $9.6 trillion and more than 1 million lost jobs by 2035, as the Heritage Foundation forecasts, it’d be a good idea to be sure there’s a sound basis before making such a massive sacrifice.
We’ve noted before that climate change is occurring as it always has, but the claim that man-made greenhouse gases will cause catastrophic temperature increases is based on questionable science and projections. Man’s contribution to greenhouse gases is minuscule. There are some theories but no convincing proof that increased emissions cause increased temperature.
Now another serious doubt has been raised concerning how much of the 1-degree centigrade increase over the past century allegedly caused by escalating emissions has even occurred.
“We can’t know for sure if global warming is a problem if we can’t trust the data,” said Anthony Watts, veteran broadcast meteorologist, who for three years organized an extensive review of official ground temperature monitoring stations, in conjunction with Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and professor emeritus of the Department of Atmospheric Science at the University of Colorado.
The study, recently published by the free-market Heartland Institute, inspected 860 of the 1,221 U.S. ground stations that gauge temperature changes. The findings were alarming.
They found 89 percent of stations “fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements” that say stations must be located at least 100 feet from artificial heat sources.
“We 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,” Mr. Watts reported.
Many stations also had added more sensitive measuring devices, heat-generating radio transmission devices and even latex paint to replace original whitewash, resulting in greater heat retention and reflection.
At one location, Mr. Watts said when he “stood next to the temperature sensor, I could feel warm exhaust air from the nearby cell phone tower equipment sheds blowing past me! I realized this official thermometer was recording the temperature of a hot zone . . . and other biasing influences including buildings, air conditioner vents and masonry.”
These influences produce readings higher than actual ambient temperatures, Mr. Watts said. Moreover, the research revealed “major gaps in the data record that were filled in with data from nearby sites, a practice that propagates and compounds errors.”
These inflated, error-prone, tinkered-with temperature recordings are one of several measurements cited by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as evidence man-made global warming is a threat. But the Heartland study concluded, “The U.S. temperature record is unreliable. And since the U.S. record is thought to be ‘the best in the world,’ it follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable.”
Before devastating the economy to fix a problem that may not exist, we ought to get the numbers right.
I couldn’t expect less from you. Congratulations, Anthony. Make extensive my congratulations to the team. 🙂
Congrats Anthony! The OCR is a very good paper. Not your typical liberal rag. A quick check just now I saw an article stating circulation was 250k weekdays and over 300k on Sunday, but the article was a year old, and they’ve been suffering a decline like most newspapers. More important is their location. Orange county is a hotbed of business, and home to many very wealthy corporate executives and wealthy east coasters wanting a second home in the sun. So, the reach of influence is probably larger than circulation would indicate.
OT, but I have noticed a rather abrupt change (increase) in the negative slope of the Arctic ice coverage curve at Cryosphere Today. This seems to coincide with the degradation of the sensors. Looking at the individual areas they measure (Beaufort Sea, etc.), the curves for the past month or so are so noisy that they strike me as highly unreliable. However, these numbers are apparently being integrated into the global sea ice numbers, which have taken a sudden dive downward to show almost no anomaly vs. the 1979-2000 mean.
Since the measurements earlier this year were trending to show less melting than the AGW crowd likes to predict, this sudden change strikes me as fishy. Any thoughts on this? Alternative sources that show different results?
Dhogaza is a highly committed and informed and effective thug for the coterie still defending the indefensible.
He has certainly applied a number of highly pejorative, not to say politically incorrect, statements in my direction. (I was his pet project for an entire week, recently. Sort of like having a seven-year old attach himself to you, proudly trying out his recently acquired stock of dirty words.)
There is an interesting analysis of the difference between land and sea temperatures at http://www.climatedata.info . It shows that for most of the 20th century the difference was more or less constant. From the 1970s onward the land temperatures rose much more rapidly than the sea temperatures. Sea temperature do not have heat island effects; land temperatures (as Anthony’s work has shown) do. The main graph is at:
http://www.climatedata.info/Temperature/assets/09-Difference%20land-ocean%20temperature.gif
I wonder how many are actually used to figure global temps?
That figure is for USHCN stations. All of them are used to figure global temps. And it’s actually worse. With the new station ratings since the paper in, it’s looking as if slightly under 10% are CRN1 or 2, not 11%.
(Santa Ana is COOP-A, but not USHCN. But only USHCN stations are included in Anthony’s percentages.)
As I look at the snow that fell in Montana last night ( http://rwis.mdt.mt.gov/scanweb/swframe.asp?Pageid=RPUStatus&Units=English&Groupid=629000&Siteid=629002&DisplayClass=Java&SenType=All; ) I wonder if the RWIS system and the weather stations used by the railroads could be used in lieu of the heat islands.
This article is a good thing, but keep in mind that the OC Register is one of the few conservative mainsteam papers in America. The skepticism inherent in Anthony’s work would be considered inappropriate by the PC police that run the Associated Press, and the AP provides most of the feed for our failing newspaper industry.
Anthony’s blink comparators showing the differences between “raw” and “homogenized” data.
It’s worse than that. “Raw” GISS data = fully adjusted NOAA data.
NOAA US raw data shows a 0.14C increase average per station (1900-2006). NOAA raw+FILNET data shows a 0.59C increase.
evanmjones:
“That figure is for USHCN stations. All of them are used to figure global temps.”
But GISS’s website:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
says they don’t use all of the GHCN/USHCN/SCAR data, but that they drop urban stations that don’t have a nearby rural station, so apparently GISS doesn’t use all of the USHCN stations.
However, they do say
“the urban and peri-urban (i.e., other than rural) stations are adjusted so that their long-term trend matches that of the mean of neighboring rural stations”
So I’m still not clear if GISS used the Santa Ana station, and if they did, if they make adjustments to it?
We have a station under almost the same conditions as it is located the Santa Ana station in the photo above. The average temperature registered at rural stations is 28 °C, just now, while the temperature at our urban station is… 31 °C; three degrees higher. The average of rural and urban is 29.5 °C… During the winter or if it is windy or overcast, the difference is almost five degrees. Heh! 🙂
Congrats Anthony –
I find playing this “catch-up” game of stats, facts, fantasy and fear so very exhausting.
The human condition: “possession is 9/10th of the law”…as if to stake a claim, theory sprints past where fact pauses, ponders and proves.
An appropriate quote: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon,1855
Great website – Thanks
Anthony,
I would like to add my congratulations to the others posting on you excellent blog. I greatly appreciate the work you and your many volunteers have put into surveying surface stations. I also appreciate the effort in running WUWT, and the results it produces. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. You definitely doing something, and the results are becoming evident.
Congratulations, Anthony and all your assistants. As E.M. Smith wrote, the readers for the OCR are relatively affluent, intelligent, and most likely conservative. Unfortunately, the paper has dropped to 5th in readership in California from 3rd; nevertheless, those 250,724 readers are influential. You could not have had a clearer, more concise, informative editorial writer than this one either. And the format might serve as an example to the main stream (corporate) media — whenever they go off payola or begin to lose too many readers and viewers.
For emphasis: Part of the first sentence: “It’d be a good idea to be sure there’s a sound basis before making such a massive sacrifice.”
The last sentence: “Before devastating the economy to fix a problem that may not exist, we ought to get the numbers right.”
“We’ve noted before that climate change is occurring as it always has….”
“Man’s contribution to greenhouse gases is minuscule.”
Lead sentence in 4th paragraph: “We can’t know for sure if global warming is a problem if we can’t trust the data,” said Anthony Watts…
Regarding the Surface Stations Study, the Editors, not Mr. Watts, say, “The findings were alarming.” The detail on the report is excellent.
“These inflated, error-prone, tinkered-with temperature recordings are one of several measurements cited by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as evidence man-made global warming is a threat”. (The Editor’s conclusion.)
What a great model. No wonder you are being roughed up on “warmist” sites!
Great work, Anthony, you deserve at least three rousing cheers!
I wonder — are there any statistics on the number of A/C heat-exchange condensers, cellular phone transmitter installations etc. that were located on rooftops near temperature sensors before 1945 when the big increase in CO^2 is presumed to have started, supposedly creating “AGW” and those inaccurate higher temperature measurements to blame on it? Did the temperature rise if the building housed more workers who used more computers after 1945, greatly increasing the heat being dumped on the roof near the temperature sensor?
Did the big increase in heat-producing power usage after 1945 pollute temperature measurement on a scale comparable to or greater than the increase in CO^2? If a big carbon tax is imposed on coal-fired electric power generators, will operation of those rooftop A/C condensing units be reduced and cause temperature measurements to drop, ergo causing global cooling?
Clearly, the time has come to junk all the questionably polluted temperature data collected in the past and relocate the earth-based sensors away from hot rooftops, heat-producing machinery, asphalt parking lots, and urban heat islands.
Bob
Anthony deserves kudos for his surface stations project and congratulations for being featured in the OCR. However, one question about the temperature series generated by the surface stations has always puzzled me:
Given that 89 percent of NOAA weather stations “fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements”, some failing miserably as shown by Anthony, and given that these failures almost always result in a heat bias, why is it that the GISS surface station temperature series tracks so well with the more accurate satellite series from RSS and UAH? It must be the adjustments they make, right? Maybe that’s why the GISS dataset is the last one to be released? Perhaps the GISS team, knowing that its inputs are crap, waits to see what the “real” results are and then adjusts their data accordingly? Just speculating…
Anthony,
I wrote the editorial in the Register. We’ve followed your work for some time and find it persuasive.
I blog quite often – to the distress of some alarmist readers, I’m afraid – on global warming at the Register’s opinion blog, http://www.ocregister.com/orangepunch.
Please keep me abreast of new developments, and you might visit our blog occasionally to balance out my hate mail in the comments.
Thanks.
At your service in Christ . . .
Mark Landsbaum
Editorial Writer
Orange County Register
REPLY: Thanks Mark, I will have new information soon, and I’ll pass it along to you. WUWT readers, please consider a visit to “Orange punch” – Anthony
Dave Hunt (08:39:20) :
Following the UK Met Offices prediction of a ‘barbeque summer’ the Daily Telegraph reported today that snow fell in Cumbria and the north Pennines yesterday. This is the first time snow has fallen in England in June for more than 30 years! I live in north east England where the temprature was 24C on Monday and had fallen to 8C by yesterday.
I rode over the Pennines this morning on my motorcycle. Man it was brisk! The snow was 60 miles further north, but it was close to freezing where I crossed too.
Mark Landsbaum (11:39:52) :
Anthony,
I wrote the editorial in the Register. We’ve followed your work for some time and find it persuasive.
I blog quite often – to the distress of some alarmist readers, I’m afraid – on global warming at the Register’s opinion blog, http://www.ocregister.com/orangepunch.
Mark, thanks for posting on this board and thanks for writing the editorial on Anthony’s work. I just browsed your opinion blog and I love it. It will become regular reading. I especially liked your recent entry about public vs. private salaries and benefits.
I think you are getting to the answer here. Assuming that all these weather stations started out with OK sitings then each year a few more became compromised and gave higher readings this would explain the gradual rise in average temperature. If now 89% are compromised then probably we are at the point where there are not more, or not many more, being compromised each year. This would explain why the ‘warming’ has stopped but also why the warmists can still claim that it is much hotter today on average than it was before. I am not a scientist but have worked in IT for many years where the concept of GIGO is well known. This could be the biggest example the world has ever seen!
Alan Haile (12:37:19) :
[…]
I am not a scientist but have worked in IT for many years where the concept of GIGO is well known. This could be the biggest example the world has ever seen!
I would argue (as I did in a post above) that we are not seeing GIGO. Anthony’s work proves that we are seeing garbage in, but the output closely tracks RSS and UAH satellite datasets. It is not “garbage out.” The garbage is being cleaned up somehow.
Somebody please post a link to the graph that compares all 4 major temperature records.
But GISS’s website:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
says they don’t use all of the GHCN/USHCN/SCAR data, but that they drop urban stations that don’t have a nearby rural station, so apparently GISS doesn’t use all of the USHCN stations.
That’s GISS.
But I am pretty sure NOAA (an entirely different org.) uses them all, including the records of stations that are closed. (Perhaps a few outliers are excluded, but I don’t know.) HCN is the designation for stations used for the permanent historical temperature record rather than for local purposes. I have read that some non-HCN stations are used for purposes of FILNET to homogenize or fill in data for HCN stations but I cannot confirm this.
NOAA spplies a -.05C/century trend adjustment to their records to account for urban stations. This seems to be roughly correct: 9% are urban and the raw trend for urban stations is 0.5C. However this may be complicated by incorrect urban designations which might wash out some of the difference.
why is it that the GISS surface station temperature series tracks so well with the more accurate satellite series from RSS and UAH?
Satellites measure lower troposphere (by microwave proxy), not the surface. During a warming phase, Lower trop warms up to 1.3 times faster than surface, depending on latitude. (And I would infer that they drop at the same rate during a cooling phase.) In recent years there hasn’t been much trend, so I would guess the anomalies would match fairly well.
Note that GISS takes a lot of liberties with pre-satellite data.
3×2 (03:29:02)
I think that Anthony deserves a round of applause he is the ANTI-GORE 🙂
REPLY: Thanks Mark, I will have new information soon, and I’ll pass it along to you. WUWT readers, please consider a visit to “Orange punch” – Anthony
Not only a visit, I’ve added it to my favorites so I can read something “punching” each day. 🙂