This, among other reasons, is why I am not a climate paranoiac

Kenneth Hynek • 12th May 2009 • World News, American News, Society, Environmentalism
Earth, NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, NOAA

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I’d be more willing to accept the proposition that I should be worried about changes in the Earth’s climate if I could be sure that official efforts to measure and quantify those changes were being carried out in a manner that produced accurate results.

An 89% failure rate, however, is not something which I take to be very convincing.

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, no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations.

During the past few years I recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to visually inspect and photographically document more than 860 of these temperature stations. We were shocked by what we found.

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.

In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations — nearly 9 of every 10 — fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.

…

It gets worse. We observed that changes in the technology of temperature stations over time also has caused them to report a false warming trend. We found major gaps in the data record that were filled in with data from nearby sites, a practice that propagates and compounds errors. We found that adjustments to the data by both NOAA and another government agency, NASA, cause recent temperatures to look even higher.

The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.

This is just one example, of course, although I’m not aware of similar climate monitoring efforts underway elsewhere in the world (it is possible they exist, and it’s just as possible that they are set up just as poorly). I do know that NASA has climate monitoring satellites in orbit around the planet at present…and that these actually tend to show a gradual cooling trend, apparently. But given that NASA’s contributions to the NOAA effort are themselves suspect, I’m inclined to take their satellite data with a similar quantity of salt.

(hat tip)