And now, the most influential station in the GISS record is …

Does this mean that, say, the 243 stations are adjusted the same amount, or do they all get corrected to become parallel with the reference? Here I thought that that the existence of microclimates made differences of even a few degrees within a 100s of metres. What if you have a stationary cold front between the reference station and a number of the adjusted stations? I’ve driven from winter in Canada, across the snow belt south of the Great Lakes and into spring weather within 1000 km in a day.
I guess if you can adjust the data any way you like you can be an expert on “what’s going on in the depth of the oceans, the lands, the ice caps and the upper limits of the stratosphere” or whatever it is they say they are knowledgeable about.
Reply: The amount of correction (or the amount of a station’s “influence” is inversely proportional to the distance of the rural station from the urban station it is correcting. – John

My feeling now is – don’t even bother collecting temperature records other than for local interest. There are just too many problems with trying to take the temperature from everywhere and have it mean something. You just end up with junk information.

Again, I find more and more that the debate about TEMPERATURES is meaningless! The ONLY thing that counts. The ONLY thing that is important is RADIATIVE BALANCE.
And the ONLY reliable information on that comes from SATELLITES!
Heaven help us from the people who do not understand the OXYMORON of “average temperature”.

I’m puzzled by the number of stations this appears to indicate. If the 100 most used reference stations average about 200 stations each that are adjusted to them, many more than 20,000 stations (probably more than 40,000) are monitored, unless the adjusted stations rely on several reference stations which would be an even greater nightmare. If there are indeed 30 or 40 thousand stations that are being monitored by the weather service, then an idea for an alternative array of stations would be to select at random, say, 2,000 stations and use these as a base for monitoring trends. Possibly one could reject the worst located ones and end up with 1200 (the number used by GISS).
Reply: Multiple rural stations are “averaged” together before they are used to adjust an urban station. And that average depends on how far away the rural stations are from the urban station.
As an example, a station A in Connecticut and a Station B in New Jersey can be used to adjust both New York City and Philadelphia. However, A will have a larger influence on NYC than B, while the opposite is true on Philadelphia.

So – at the risk of being redundant – UHI is adjusted using sites that themselves are susceptible to UHI? Priceless. Is this a case where these people never leave their cubbies to see what the field really looks like?
Statistically – if the population of sites keeps shrinking, and the sites themselves are contaminated by their proximity to heat sinks/radiators, I can’t see anything of value coming from this data. The adjustments themselves stink to high heaven.

The exploration of global climate change is of necessity the domain of scientists with an appropriate background, armed with accurate data to synthesize and support their hypotheses. However, the current debate is often dry and lacks historical depth. Information has been uncovered that places global warming square in the middle of startling revelations grounded in fact.
Have you wondered about the origin of the name Greenland? Wikipedia admits that ice-core studies in Greenland reveal rapid shifts in the climate of the Northern Hemisphere going back 100,000 years, but chooses to frame the information in the context of catastrophic global warming. This paragraph, which appears to contradict mainstream AGW, survives:
“Scientists who probed two kilometers (1.2 miles) through a Greenland glacier to recover the oldest plant DNA on record said the planet was far warmer hundreds of thousands of years ago than is generally believed… That view contrasts sharply with the prevailing one that a lush forest of this kind could only have existed in Greenland as recently as 2.4 million years ago.”
Wikipedia claims that the name Greenland was chosen to entice people to settle there, however other sources indicate that the region was quite warm during the time from 900 to 1200 AD, and named appropriately:
“…The next migration came from the east, following “Erik the Red” Thorwaldsson’s exploration of the southern coast of Greenland between 982 and 985 AD…The climate at this time was very warm, much warmer than it is today, and crops were able to do well. It seems likely that the name “Greenland” was given to the country, not just as wishful thinkful, but because it was a climatic fact at that time.”
http://explorenorth.com/library/weekly/aa121799.htm
Far stranger is the case of the map of Oronteus Finaeus. A good picture of it is available here:
http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Finaeus_Map.html
“This map was found in the Library of Congress, Washington DC in 1960 by Charles Hapgood. It was drawn by Oronteus Finaeus in 1531. As with the Piri Reis map, Antarctica is shown to be ice free with flowing rivers, drainage patterns and clean coastline. Some of the mountain ranges shown were only discovered recently. The deep interior didn’t show any rivers or mountains which some believe means it was already covered in ice at the time. The Oronteus Finaeus map is more accurate than any other map of the same time. In fact, it is more accurate than any map made anywhere up to the year 1800.
Another tidbit of proof is the Ross sea. Today huge glaciers feed into it, making it a floating ice shelf hundreds of feet thick. Yet this map and the Reis map show estuaries and rivers at the site.
In 1949 coring was done to take samples of the ice and sediment at the bottom of the Ross Sea. They clearly showed several layers of stratification, meaning the area went through several environmental changes. Some of the sediments were of the type usually brought down to the sea by rivers. Tests done at the Carnegie Institute in Washington DC, which date radioactive elements found in sea water, dated the sediments at about 4000 BC, which would mean the area was ice free with flowing rivers up until that time – exactly what is recorded on the Reis and Finaeus maps.”
http://www.timstouse.com/EarthHistory/Antarctic/oronteusfinaeus.htm
Much information regarding the map is available on the Internet. I stumbled upon it at the skeptical website Pete’s Place, Ancient map Disproves Global Warming by Allen Quist July 17, 2009 http://petesplace-peter.blogspot.com/
Many have tried to dispute the map of Oronteus Finaeus, but there is no definitive argument to disprove it. How it achieved such accuracy remains a mystery.
It is often claimed by proponents of AGW that we are entering “uncharted territory” with current levels of CO2. The geologic record shows that levels of CO2 were much higher in the past, and other records give weight to climatic swings beyond what we are currently experiencing, all without anthropogenic influence. And hey, the lousy GISS temperature record doesn’t help any.

Brandon Dobson (20:28:27) : “ Have you wondered about the origin of the name Greenland?”
There is some evidence that the voyage to what is called Greenland was not pleasant and seasoned sailors preferred not to go. Thus the crews were mainly young and inexperienced, that is to say ‘green’ and those that sailed and landed there were called ‘greenlanders’. This comes from a book from one of the last captains of the ships of the British tea trade and I’ve loaned it to a friend in another state. Best I can do at the moment.

Svante Arrhenius mused a lot;
Is the Earth warmed, or not,
By carbonic acid in the cloud?
Would that, in physics, be allowed?
Was this the way the ice retreated?
Could such a thing be repeated?
If not by Nature, then, by Man.
And so, the scientist began
To think about how he could best
Perform the perfect climate test.
To start, he said, we must be sure
About the present temperature
Of everywhere around the Earth
From Nunavut, clear through to Perth.
But, sad to say, upon reflection,
He was consumed by dejection;
The task was greater than he’d thought
To find the numbers that he sought
And though he really, really tried
He’d made no progress when he died.
There have been some others, since,
Whose attempts have made us whince;
Perhaps, there is no way to say:
Two hundred eighty-seven K

Are their Surface Station reports on these multiply used stations? Whatever they have wrong is multiplied by hundreds of times due to their usage to correct other stations.

Mike d,
Yes there were 6 or 7 times more weather reporting in 1987, before th East Bloc collapsed. Now consider this: What if a terrorist organization arranged to destroy all the weather stations North of the Mason Dixon line in Maryland and the only reports that you continued to receive were from places South of it, like Florida, Texas, Arizona and Southern California. Do you think a plot of temperatures just might show it a smidgen warmer. Wouldn’t you say that the entire time series was destroyed, and rendered useless?
Well that is EXACTLY what Herr Hansen and his cronies do, and more as well. Global Warming based on Weather Station data is a complete farce. Plus the extrapolations of the weather stations is used to create nonfactually precise climate data. If I have a thermometer that can read accurately to a degree, then averaging a bundle of such measurements and reporting changes to a few hundredths of a degree accuracy from the computed averages is pure nonsense. Yet the Global Warming is meassured in such imprecise changes.
tty,
I suggest you acquire Gavin Mencies “1421”, which records the maritime expeditions of the Ming dynasty, including their mapping of the entire World including Africa, the E and W coast of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, the Antarctic, the Arctic Ocean, a mapping of all Greenland that could only have been accomplished by circumnavigation in an ice free environment . This was done around 1420, at the middle-end of the Medieval Warm Period after all the ice had melted. Maps of the Ming expeditions circulated in Europe from Arab traders. Indeed Magellan had a copy of a Chinese map that showed the “Straights of Magellan ” before he sailed from Europe.