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.
David Ball (07:20:13) :
Tallbloke, it helps people to understand why I may be a bit reactionary. Many, such as RFK Jr. and David Suzuki have called for the deniers to be imprisoned. This is a very slippery slope for anyone in a supposedly free society to be talking about. Do these people even realize what that represents? To be imprisoned for your ideals? I like to believe in the goodness of human nature, but given the ability to abuse power in a system like socialism, is fraught with danger.
David, I twigged you were related to Tim some time ago, I’m sure I speak for all on WUWT in saying you and your kin have our support and best wishes. I know socialism is a word with a lot of baggage in America and Canada, but really this isn’t about political colours, it’s about the surveillance state politicians on all sides have become addicted to being able to use to monitor and control our lives.
[snip]
Keep on speaking up for freedom from the bureaucracy we don’t want or need, we are right alongside you.
Reply: Those analogies have no place here. ~ charles the moderator
That photo of the Santa Ana station my be facing north–but that CRS sure ain’t!
I wonder if their TOBS is in the afternoon . . .
This is what Mark Landsbaum wrote two years ago!
I think it’s great.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Global warming: Inconvenient questions
The ‘settled science’ of climate change … isn’t settled.
By MARK LANDSBAUM
Register editorial writer
Comments 1 | Recommend 0
In March, NASA scientists spotted a region on the sun they expected to be calm but instead was, “a bubbling mass of swaying and arching spikes, some more than 5,000 miles long … causing huge temperature flares,” as reported in Investor’s Business Daily.
Now a short quiz: The Earth recently has experienced a little bit of global warming, and by the way, so has Mars. What’s the common factor?
A. Sport utility vehicles
B. Fossil fuels
C. Al Gore
D. The sun
Answer: D, the sun. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany noted that the sun has been burning more brightly for the past 60 years, which they calculated would account for the entire increase in Earth’s temperature during that period. “[R]esearch suggests that for the large part variations in global temperatures are beyond our control and are instead at the mercy of the sun’s activities,” said a study by researchers at Duke University and the Army Research Office in June, 2003.
Nevertheless, we are hysterically warned that manmade global warming makes “it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet’s habitability for human civilization,” according to former Vice President Al Gore.
“[I]t’s a question of survival,” said Gore. “It’s a moral issue.”
In 2001, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) hyped its global warming study, claiming disaster loomed over the next century and that the culprit could very well be manmade carbon-dioxide emissions. We ought to do something, the IPCC report urged.
This year, IPCC revised its dire forecast, substantially softening the outlook. But the IPCC became even more insistent about man’s culpability. Curiously, the less-dire predictions became reason for more a passionate demand that we must take drastic corrective action. Immediately.
If the outlook has gotten less severe, why has the remedy gotten more drastic?
The global warming scare machine gathers momentum. Last September, before the most recent IPCC forecast, intimidation to quash dissent went into high gear. “The next IPCC report should give people the final push that they need to take action, and we can’t have people trying to undermine it,” said a Royal Society of London statement, essentially demanding global warming critics should shut up.
Why the resistance? Consider some motives. Could it be because Europe’s attempts to force cuts in CO2 emissions have failed dramatically? After 10 years, nearly every Western European nation is producing more not less CO2, but at considerable additional economic cost due to the Kyoto Protocol’s Draconian regulations. Could it be because since peaking in 1998, the average global temperature has decreased, not increased? How much of that trend can alarmists risk before people wonder why reality doesn’t match the scare story? Could it be because federal funding for global warming research is undermined by skeptics who point out holes in the theory?
Perhaps, global warming proponents are aggressively pushing their agenda for fear the public will shrug off their claims as bogus, and politicians will be unable to justify a heavy hand. Quick, act now before the problem disappears entirely! Windows of opportunity don’t stay open forever. Just 30 years ago the environmental-governmental conglomerate was convinced we were irreversibly on the road to the next Ice Age.
What we do know is that the global warming bandwagon is a convergence of those who stand to gain control (government), those who stand to profit (government-financed researchers), those who see profiteering and control as inevitable so position themselves to get their share of the pie (big corporations) and, of course, ideologues who worship everything green (radical environmentalists). For good measure throw in a superficial media’s insatiable appetite for disaster stories, emotive Hollywood celebrities and opportunistic politicians, and it’s a formidable coalition, indeed.
As President Eisenhower presciently warned in his farewell address: “Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity … The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever-present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.”
Despite what you may hear from self-interested scientific technological elites, global warming occurs naturally. Historically it has been as beneficial as it has been detrimental. Man’s contribution to it today is somewhere between small and insignificant. Hurricane activity hasn’t been linked to global warming, and there are fewer of them since 1970, anyway. Seas won’t rise 20 feet. Grazing cows create more greenhouse gas than your SUV. But that’s not exactly the party line of global warming alarmists.
Let’s examine some global warming issues: the alleged scientific “consensus” that manmade CO2 is a threat, the computerized models forecasting the threat, the science they are based on, the solutions being advanced and some possible motives.
‘Consensus’
“It is sheer fantasy to suggest that a huge majority of scientists with expertise in global climate change endorse an alarming interpretation of the recent climate data,” climate physicist S. Fred Singer, a research professor at George Mason University, writes in his book, “Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years.”
Although it’s generally conceded that industrialized societies add to atmospheric CO2 levels, whether it has an adverse environmental effect continue to be vigorously debated within the scientific community.
Computerized climate models
In his book “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming,” Christopher C. Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, reveals “the dirtiest secret of all regarding climate models: When we attempt to test them, they fail miserably.” Computer models are only as good as the data entered in them.
Add bias to this imperfect picture. The IPCC previously generated 24 different computer models with a vast range of predictions. The Clinton-Gore administration cherry-picked the two models with the hottest and wettest predictions to illustrate the global warming threat. The worst of the worst.
Even so, climate models are so unreliable they can’t even “predict” what’s already happened. Inputting known facts from past dates doesn’t result in “forecasts” of the actual temperatures that occurred on those dates.
“It is scientific malpractice to use them,” observes University of Virginia environmental sciences research professor Patrick Michaels. “I choose my words carefully here. If a physician prescribed medication that demonstrably did not work, he would lose his license.”
Singer agrees: “The models have erroneously predicted a 20{+t}{+h} century surge in Earth’s temperatures to match surging CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. It hasn’t happened.”
The science
Exhale. There. You’ve just polluted the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is an essential, natural substance for man, animals and plants. But thanks to the amateur scientists sitting as Supreme Court justices, carbon dioxide now officially is regarded to be a “pollutant.” In reality, CO2’s connection to global warming is not that it pollutes the atmosphere, but that as it collects in the atmosphere it prevents heat from escaping into space.
In theory, greenhouse gases – of which man’s contribution is about 0.28 percent – trap heat close to the Earth. “The greenhouse effect must play some role,” concedes Henrik Svensmark, director of the Centre for Sun-Climate Research, Danish National Space Center. “But those who are absolutely certain that the rise in temperatures is due solely to carbon dioxide have no scientific justification. It’s pure guesswork.”
Singer, who makes the case for a “moderate, natural 1,500-year climate cycle” of global warming and cooling, says if greenhouse theory is accurate, the poles should have warmed several degrees Celsius since 1940. Instead, polar temperatures have fallen.
Moreover, climate scientists note that historically increases in atmospheric CO2 often follow rather than precede increases in global temperatures, belying the theory that the gas brings on warmer climate.
Even if CO2 were a global warming demon, could its effect be reversed? “There is no known, feasible policy that can stop or even slow these changes in a fashion that could be scientifically measured,” according to Michaels.
Solutions
“Control energy, and you control the economy,” author Horner writes. The “Kyoto (Protocol) and its ilk seek to ration energy use.” Even Kyoto’s advocates admit its carbon emission cuts are only a “first step,” despite the havoc they play on economies.
“There is no dispute at all about the fact that even if punctiliously observed, [the Kyoto Protocol]would have an imperceptible effect on future temperatures – one-twentieth of a degree by 2050,” Singer observes. Kyoto’s effect on warming would be so minimal as to be measurably insignificant.
In Canada, similar efforts also have been costly and ineffective. A previously suppressed report by the Canadian government evaluating the effectiveness of spending $500 million since the year 2000 to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases revealed the money largely was wasted, producing neither greenhouse gas reductions nor new, cleaner technologies.
Motives
“Scientists who want to attract attention to themselves, who want to attract great funding to themselves, have to (find a) way to scare the public … and this you can achieve only by making things bigger and more dangerous than they really are,” said Petr Chylek, professor of physics and atmospheric science at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, as quoted in the book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming.”
“Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding,” observed MIT Sloan Professor of Meteorology Richard Lindzen, who, incidentally, was one of the IPCC’s contributing authors.
Dr. William Gray, professor of atmospheric sciences at Colorado State University, a leading expert on hurricane predictions, says flatly: “Researchers pound the global-warming drum because they know there is politics, and money behind it.”
IMPLICATIONS
If global warming doesn’t really portend radical climate change, what will change if we adopt all the Draconian and expensive measures alarmists demand? You will pay more to get less, economic growth will be retarded, and government will control more than it does now.
“Be Worried. Be Very Worried” was Time magazine’s global warming headline a year ago. There is reason to worry. But it has little to do with the slight increase in global temperatures we may experience over the next century.
If the world redirects its resources, taxes its citizenry and restricts its industries as alarmists desire, what will happen when the issue cools off, so to speak?
If warming gives way to cooling, as it always has in the Earth’s history, will you get a refund of the new taxes you’ve been forced to pay? Will industries driven bankrupt be reestablished? Will the millions of persons in the Third World who died because they were denied the benefits that come with economic development be resurrected?
There is much at stake, economically, socially, and indeed, morally.
Contact the writer: mlandsbaum@ur momisugly ocregister.com or 714-796-5025
WTH (08:43:36) :
Thanks for the link to gistemp stations.
My local is on the list, I finally have some free time so digital camera is ready. 🙂
I have friends that travel the UK so I could probably get dropped at sites to be picked up on their return.
DaveE.
My first thought on reading the op ed was F****** H***. In a good way of course.
I can only say WOW, it’s great that recognition is there now & more power to your elbow Anthony et al.
Ron de Haan (15:07:41) :
Unfortunately I can’t register on the OCRegister site being outside the USA, I suppose I could borrow a friends zip code though. I’ll ask her 🙂
I like Mark Landsbaum, he has his head screwed on & seems to research his op eds well.
DaveE.
As for the sites used by NOAA.
Why do they only give the location to 6 nautical miles?
DaveE.
DaveE,
I will send Mark Landbaum an e-mail (published at his site) and ask him
how to leave comments at his site.
No problem but thanks for your cooperation.
Good press contacts are of the essence, especially if it what they are writing makes sense.
AGW alarmism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy and unafraid.
With apologies to H. L. Mencken
Alan Caruba is at it too. Love his writing.
From http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Weather Malarkey
By Alan Caruba
I have never been able to figure out why people who know that the forecast for the local weather is likely to be wrong by the afternoon of the same day or within 48 hours still believe that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can accurately predict what it will be ten, twenty or fifty years from now.
At the third Conference on Climate Change held last week in Washington, DC., an event sponsored by the non-profit, free market think tank, The Heartland Institute, “Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change” (NIPCC) was announced. It offers a very different picture from the endless scare campaigns of the leading environmental organizations or, for that matter, from the White House and Congress.
Edited by Craig Idso and S. Fred Singer, two climatologists, it runs a whopping 900 pages that includes 35 contributors and reviewers of climate data. Its final 200 pages are mostly appendices, including a directory of all scientists who signed the Global Warming Petition that, in March, numbered 31,478 of them.
The Petition urged the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. One of those proposals is a nation-destroying epic “climate” bill intended to limit greenhouse gas emissions, mainly carbon dioxide, with an absurd “cap-and-trade” program that is little more than a huge tax on all use of energy by Americans.
Suffice it to say that the original Kyoto Protocols were rejected unanimously by a former Senate when they were first announced and, since they are allegedly directed at saving the Earth from “global warming”, the threat of this calamity ended around 1998 when the Earth began to cool. It has been in a cooling cycle ever since.
Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?
Neither the protocols, nor the current “climate” bill have any merit whatever. Both are based on falsified “scientific” data courtesy of the UN Panel. Bad, inaccurate weather information seems to be the stock-in-trade of environmental organizations and thanks to Anthony Watts, a meteorologist with some 25 years in the forecasting business and chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio, a publication, “Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?” is available from The Heartland Institute ($12.99 per copy for 1-10 copies.)
As Watts points out, “The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).”
Until now, however, “no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations.” Watts recruited 650 volunteers and their findings are astounding and disturbing.
“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. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.”
The report found that 89 percent of the stations, nearly 9 out of 10, failed to meet the National Weather Service’s own requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.
So, based on these monitoring stations, very little of the temperatures reported by the U.S. Weather Service are accurate and, more importantly, provide false data which has been used to underwrite the “global warming” hoax.
Filled with photos of the stations and charts of the data they produce, the conclusion is inescapable: “The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.”
When one considers that during the course of a single day and night, the temperature anywhere can vary widely, the notion that anyone can determine the nation’s or entire Earth’s average temperature based on such stations around the world is literally impossible.
Weather satellites provide a better gauge and, as noted, they have been reporting a cooling Earth since 1998.
The Greens aren’t the only ones who can make predictions, albeit for the purpose of scaring people into believing the bogus “global warming” hoax, I can do that too. I predict that the Greens will unleash an unholy attack on The Heartland Institute’s NIPCC report in order to discredit it.
Now, who are you going to believe? The thermometer your home or apartment uses to determine the temperature outside or the Greens? As for your local weather report, it is useful for perhaps a day, maybe two. After that, it’s anyone’s guess.
For more information, visit http://www.surfacestations.org.
Anthony,
Your work will be remembered as one of the single most important pieces of evidence against the cult of AGW.
Thanks for your efforts!
Alan Hale (12:37:19) regarding Garbage In Garbage Out, I like the comment made by Willie Soon recently, Garbage In Gospel Out.
‘Hot’ damn!
Kudos for breaking through that seemingly impenetrable wall.
The truth will out and you, Anthony, will have been a part of the wave of brave, determined and honest souls that took this beach head and began the process of freeing minds from the myth of AGW.
It is great to see Mark here. As mentioned on the other
recent thread that brought up this OCR editorial, I have
been working with the OCR on this issue for nearly a
year now.
Last August’s “City Heat” piece was a bad one. The
reporter did a single-source article (from that Santa Ana
station) and it got an above-the-fold, front-page placement.
That was a serious journalism error. Diepenbrock, the
reporter’s boss, but below Mark, agreed that the article
was poorly sourced and had too prominent placement.
He also agreed to do a piece with similar placement if
we could fundamentally disprove AGW by showing the
station placement all over the country was bad.
Yes, the tide is turning. Mark did not have wait for the
tide to fully go out write an _editorial_. The news and
editorial departments are not the same. When Dipenbrock
goes ahead with a front-page “There is no AGW” piece,
well then we will have made _serious_ progress. In the
mean time, keep up the good work.
Here is a few bucks to help the cause.
John Andrews
I can’t wait to see the plots using only the good stations and see what the real story is on temperature.
Meanwhile, the sun spots have all disappeared again…
All you’ll have is a bunch of disparate data points that really have no relation to each other.
About 25 years ago I was one of a group of parents involved in a dustup with the Pomona Unified School District that resulted in litigation. The editor of the local paper tried to sit on the story, but a young reporter then working for the LA Times wrote a fair piece we were able to use to good effect. (Made a bunch of copies and flew them around our end of town.) We won the court case, thanks in part to the power of the press.
Mark, I don’t think I ever had the chance to thank you for your honest reporting. It’s good to see you’re still on the job.
John Slayton
Keith Minto (19:05:10) :
I’ve used Garbage In, Gospel Out for decades, though I didn’t create it. Somehow it’s never caught on – I guess all us past users never had the right “street cred.” It sure applies to much of climate change advocacy!
Maybe The Onion could use that in a story about GISS adopting it as their motto.
Ric Werme (22:13:51) :
Keith Minto (19:05:10) :
Alan Hale (12:37:19) regarding Garbage In Garbage Out, I like the comment made by Willie Soon recently, Garbage In Gospel Out.
Maybe The Onion could use that in a story about GISS adopting it as their motto.
The Onion appears to be enjoying status quo funding from alarmists – they don’t dare skewer the beast. But Dr. Roy Spenser has no such fear:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/20/AR2006052001151.html
I pledge another $100 to the tip jar if another major network or newspaper with 250,000+ circulation writes up a supportive story on this topic.
Reading the enthusiasm from readers in this blog, and seeing the results Sir Anthony has produced, I must say I feel that my very modest donations thus far to the tip jar have been put to exceptional use. Here you can really see results from donations made, and you do not have to wonder if your donations just get burned up by a huge inefficient bureacracy.
Questions for taxpayers to ponder:
1. How much would it have cost for the NOAA etc. to have conducted such a survey of surface stations as Anthony’s?
2. How long would it have taken them?
3. What does it currently cost the government to gather, process and publicize the data?
4. For the cost in No. 3, can we be satisfied with the quality of the the data?
5. Can we base public policy decisions on this high priced data?
6. What will be the costs of basing policy decisions on junk data?
The answer to these questions ought to scare anyone.
…and I’ll double that if Newsweek, Time, NYT, WaPo or the UK Guardian go with it.
Offer limited to 90 days!
Smokey (07:00:24) :
69% of all the Surface Stations surveyed are out of tolerance by ≥2°C: click [CRN=4 + CRN=5].
Can you give evidential proof of these figures or is this guess work?
bill,
Unless I’m misunderstanding your question, the ‘evidential proof’ you want was taken from Anthony’s Surface Stations site.
Please check it out. You will see that the U.S. surface station record is unreliable.
Of course, failing to fight global warming will cost the economy $19.2 trillion and 3 million lost jobs by 2030. Why do they always fail to mention the offset?
REPLY: Citations?