NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:
Dear reader:
Perhaps you’ve heard that the Earth is warming and the glaziers will melt and so on… But you’ve probably also heard by other people clamming that all this about the global warming is just an engineered plan by the global government agents to expand and control the people. In other words, they claim is a fraud.
Well, this article written by Ed Hiserodt and Rebecca Terrell, will present to you their perspective, and you can be the judge. Due to lack of space, it will be published in three parts. THIS IS PART 2 OF THREE. To read the first part visit: https://elreporterosf.com/?p=22816
What on earth is happening to our temperature?
by Ed Hiserodt and Rebecca Terrell
Manipulating the data
A January 2017 joint announcement made by NASA, NOAA, and CRU claimed that the Earth experienced “record breaking temperatures for three years in a row” — 2014, 2015, and 2016. Mainstream media shrieked doomsday headlines such as “2016 Blows Away Temp Records” and “Climate Trends Continue to Break Records.” These “official” temperature readings came from some 3,000 weather stations and also include measurements of sea-surface temperatures. But have you noticed that they don’t bother troubling you with actual numbers?
Here they are: 2015 was 0.02ºC warmer than 2014. Then 2016 was 0.01ºC warmer than 2015. It stretches mental limits to imagine how these agencies actually determine the average global temperature to the nearest 0.01ºC, particularly when an amazing 0.10ºC margin of error accompanies these “record breaking temperatures”! As Federalist writer Robert Tracinski aptly put it: “That’s like saying the ball is on the 10 yard line — give or take a hundred yards.” But even if accurate, do these very slight differences truly show a warming trend? If mainstream outlets had any scientific honor, their article titles would have sounded something more like: “Even in the Face of an Unusually Strong El Niño, the Global Temperature Has Not Statistically Changed in the Last Three Years.”
Moreover, there are problems that severely limit temperature-recording accuracy. One is a shift in weather-recording stations from colder to warmer climates, another relates to how NASA, NOAA, and CRU treat “missing” data, and a third stems from improperly sited stations. Quoting a 2010 Science and Public Policy Institute report, Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? by Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts, William F. Jasper reported for The New American last year:
Globally, the number of surface temperature stations dropped from 6,000 to just over 1,000. “The Russian station count dropped from 476 to 121 so over 40 percent of Russian territory was not included in global temperature calculations,” note D’Aleo and Watts. “In Canada, the number of stations dropped from 600 to less than 50.” Less than 50 for all of Canada! At the same time, more mid-latitude and lower-elevation stations were added, along with more populated centers, adding more urban heat island (UHI) effect. D’Aleo and Watts point out: “Forty percent of GHCN v2 stations have at least one missing month. This is concentrated in the winter months.” No problem; the NOAA/NASA/GHCN folks simply “infill” with “adjusted” data, always biasing in the warming direction, of course.
Meanwhile, southern climes have seen the addition of temperature recording sites, such as the 2008 creation of NOAA’s technically advanced 114-station U.S. Climate Reference Network. A mere five years later, NOAA announced closure of nearly 600 weather stations in its U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) after research by retired meteorologist Anthony Watts revealed that nearly 90 percent of U.S. stations “fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.” Watts scoffed at the closure announcement, calling it “too little, too late” and asking Fox News, “The question remains as to why they continue to use a polluted mix of well-sited and poorly-sited stations.”
The situation has hardly improved since. A recent provocative article in the Deplorable Climate Science Blog entitled “100 percent of US Warming is Due to NOAA Data Tampering” contends that NOAA has been further manipulating USHCN records.
Satellite Data
The “satellite analyses” Curry noted are the same analyses mentioned earlier, performed by UAH and RSS. Doctors Roy Spencer and John Christy have directed the UAH program since its 1978 inception. Speaking of the “Pausebuster Paper,” Spencer told Fox News, “We believe the satellite measurements since 1979 provide a more robust measure of global temperatures, and both satellite research groups see virtually the same pause in global temperatures for the last 18 years.” Spencer criticized NOAA, calling its 2015 study “one more example that you can get any answer you want when the thermometer data errors are larger than the global warming signal you are looking for.” On the other hand, UAH boasts a track record of preserving its findings from political bias.
Figure 4 is the January 2017 update of global temperatures from Spencer’s popular website, www.drroyspencer.com. Two peaks stand out on the record: one in 1998 and the waning 2015 El Niño Pacific disturbances. The January 2017 plot of +0.30ºC means the global temperature average exceeds the baseline average for 1980 to 2005 by about a third of a degree Celsius, or about one-half degree Fahrenheit.
Despite its close relationship with NASA, the RSS agrees closely with UAH. Consider Figure 5, which plots both organizations’ datasets.
Both UAH and RSS show a trend line for a decrease in temperature since 1995 — UAH at -0.024ºC per decade, and RSS at -0.032ºC per decade. If we extend these to 100 years, UAH predicts a decrease in temperature of 1.2ºC, while RSS projects a 1.6ºC decrease. Not quite in keeping with the climate models that predict a four- or five-degree rise in temperature.
