Why America's record average temperature is so hard to take -- or believe
In 2008 I wrote some columns about how weather stations being used to take America's average temperature were skewed higher because they were located in extra-hot places. They still are.
Accurately taking our huge and climatically diverse country's temperature to see if it has gone up or down a tenth of degree is absurdly impossible on its face.
Using the ‘average’ temperature of the country you come up with each year to determine government policies about energy use or electric cars is even more absurd — and dangerous.
But the global warming hysterics don't care.
They insist that the USA, North America and the entire planet is getting hotter and hotter every year and that it’s an existential threat to life on Earth.
The trouble is, the government scientists who collect and analyze the daily temperature data from about 1,100 National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather stations around the country are not to be trusted.
This current article explains that the temperature readings are ‘garbage’ and the data’s unreliability is getting worse.
Some of its main points: :
Urban heat island warming bias is 'so overwhelming' -- up to 7° warmer during the day and 5°F warmer at night.
96% of NOAA stations fail to meet NOAA's own standards.
Electronic thermometers subject to weather/wind effects.
The weather station network is not rigorously controlled.
On top of these, NOAA scientists have been caught faking or “adjusting” the temperature readings to fit their earth-is-boiling narrative.
The national media are too biased to question the accuracy of the temperature numbers. They’re also too stupid to wonder how they are gathered.
But I've known about the inherent unreliability of NOAA’s weather station data since 2008, thanks to the work of a great meteorologist named Anthony Watts.
Here’s an interview I had with Watts in 2009.
Anthony Watts — Weatherman of truth
The best place to learn the truth about all things climate still is the never hysterical, always skeptical and incredibly sensible site run by meteorologist Anthony Watts
— WattsUpWithThat.com
Here’s the latest news on Anthony Watts’ long crusade to ‘fact-check’ America’s weather stations from Epoch Times.
More than 90 percent of NOAA’s temperature monitoring stations have a heat bias, according to Anthony Watts, a meteorologist, senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute, author of climate web site Watts Up With That, and director of a study that examined NOAA’s climate stations.
“And with that large of a number, over 90 percent, the methods that NOAA employs to try to reduce this don’t work because the bias is so overwhelming,” Mr. Watts told The Epoch Times.
“The few stations that are left that are not biased because they are, for example, outside of town in a field and are an agricultural research station that’s been around for 100 years ... their data gets completely swamped by the much larger set of biased data. There’s no way you can adjust that out.”
Here’s an old article from WattsUpWithThat that shows a bunch of poorly located weather stations like this one.
And here’s a hilarious gallery of Los Angeles weather stations on the burning rooftops and asphalted ground of LA.
Here is a news item from 2023 that talks about the unreliability of weather stations:
The lies & stupidity never stops ….
U.S. Climate Data Compromised by
Sensors' Proximity to Heat Sources, Critics Say
By Joseph Abrams
A critical cog in the machinery that drives the theory of global warming is a small white box not too far from where you live.
Inside the box sits a thermometer that tracks the local temperature, which in turn becomes part of a data trail for the monitoring of climate change on Earth.
But there's a problem: Nearly every single weather station the U.S. government uses to measure the country's surface temperature may be compromised.
Sensors that are supposed to be in empty clearings are instead exposed to crackling electronics and other unlikely sources of heat, from exhaust pipes and trash-burning barrels to chimneys and human graves …..
The following columns from the late 2000s about Anthony Watts’ work show that the claim that 2023 — or any single year — was the hottest year in the history of Earth is political science, not climate science.
June 17, 2007
2006 — NOT the hottest year
Remember in January when the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its good friends in media trumpeted that 2006 was the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States?
NOAA based that finding — which allegedly capped a nine-year warming streak "unprecedented in the historical record" — on the daily temperature data that its National Climatic Data Center gathers from about 1,221 mostly rural weather observation stations around the country.
Few people have ever seen or even heard of these small, simple-but-reliable weather stations, which quietly make up what NOAA calls its United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN).
But the stations play an important role in detecting and analyzing regional climate change. More ominously, they provide the official baseline historical temperature data that politically motivated global-warming alarmists like James Hansen of NASA plug into their computer climate models to predict various apocalypses.
NOAA says it uses these 1,221 weather stations -- which like the ones in Uniontown and New Castle are overseen by local National Weather Service offices and usually tended to by volunteers -- because they have been providing reliable temperature data since at least 1900.
But Anthony Watts of Chico, Calif., suspects NOAA temperature readings are not all they're cracked up to be.
As the former TV meteorologist explains on his sophisticated, newly hatched Web site surfacestations.org , he has set out to do what big-time armchair-climate modelers like Hansen and no one else has ever done — physically quality-check each weather station to see if it's being operated properly.
To assure accuracy, stations (essentially older thermometers in little four-legged wooden sheds or digital thermometers mounted on poles) should be 100 feet from buildings, not placed on hot concrete, etc.
But as photos on Watts' site show, the station in Forest Grove, Ore., stands 10 feet from an air-conditioning exhaust vent. In Roseburg, Ore., it's on a rooftop near an AC unit. In Tahoe, Calif., it's next to a drum where trash is burned.
Watts, who says he's a man of facts and science, isn't jumping to any rash conclusions based on the 40-some weather stations his volunteers have checked so far. But he said Tuesday that what he's finding raises doubts about NOAA's past and current temperature reports.
"I believe we will be able to demonstrate that some of the global warming increase is not from CO2 but from localized changes in the temperature-measurement environment."
Meanwhile, you probably missed the latest about 2006.
As NOAA reported on May 1 -- with minimum mainstream-media fanfare -- 2006 actually was the second- warmest year ever recorded in America, not the first. At an annual average of 54.9 degrees F, it was a whopping 0.08 degrees cooler than 1998, still the hottest year.
NOAA explained that it had updated its 2006 report "to reflect revised statistics" and "better address uncertainties in the instrumental record."
This tinkering is standard procedure. NOAA always scientifically tweaks temperature readings for various reasons -- weather stations are moved to different locations, modernized, affected by increased urbanization, etc.
NOAA didn't say whether it had adjusted for uncertainties caused by nearby burn barrels.
******
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Watts rattles warming theologians, but St. James Hansen is not convinced
Big things happen when you're discovered by the Drudge Report.
Ask Anthony Watts. He's the veteran meteorologist from northern California who was featured in the June 17 edition of this column because of his project to quality-check the 1,221 official weather stations used to take the country's average surface temperature.
In the hours after www.DrudgeReport.com posted the Trib's "scoop" about Watts, his Web site Watt's Up With That? was visited by 20,000 people. Normally it gets 3,000 hits a month, which is why he had to shut it down.
Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity subsequently did pieces on Watts' project, which is not looked upon warmly by climate-change alarmists. Predictably, the liberal media ignored Watts.
Things are calmer now for Watts, who said Tuesday he's making steady progress in building an Internet database that includes every one of the 1,221 small weather stations, which were handpicked by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration for their reliability and because they have been in roughly the same places for at least 100 years.
Watts believes, logically, that if the stations are not set up according to NOAA specs -- i.e., if they are not on grass, 100 feet from buildings and not sitting on hot asphalt or near air-conditioning exhaust vents -- their readings are likely to be biased toward higher temperatures.
Watts and his volunteers have now surveyed about 227 weather stations. A recent discovery: Many are sited at water sewage treatment plants, which Watts described as "giant heat bubbles."
A responsible scientist, Watts won't draw any conclusions from his research yet. But one top climate scientist -- NASA's James Hansen, the patron saint of the apocalyptic global warming movement -- apparently doesn't think Watts' dogged pursuit of scientific certainty matters much.
I asked Hansen by e-mail last week "How important is the data from these (1,221 ground) weather stations in your climate modeling?"
"It has no effect on modeling," Hansen replied. "Of course we compare modeling results with observed temperatures. But the observational analysis is based mainly on measurements at places remote from human influence. "The large observed warmings are in remote regions, e.g., the Arctic, Siberia, Canada -- the warming is clearly real, as verified in many different ways, as described in our papers. At any given station there can be significant problems, but the uncertainty in global temperature change is rather small."
I also asked Hansen if he was confident that these weather stations were "providing accurate/reliable temperature readings or readings that can be accurately tweaked/adjusted to take into account any heat-island effects or poor site placements."
"We have enough reliable stations to get a reliable temperature change for the U.S., which covers only 2 percent of the globe," Hansen answered.
Noting that Watts has found many sites whose readings are clearly compromised, I asked Hansen if that concerned him "about the long-term reliability of the temperature readings." "No," Hansen's e-mail said.
Watts had a similar but more scientifically nuanced email exchange in June with a top NASA researcher who told him -- in a rather officious and cold way -- that temperature data from NOAA ground stations is not used "in" its climate modeling or used to predict future climate.
Citizen Watts may look like a troublemaker to NASA's experts but he's convinced he's on to something important. He's found no evidence that anyone except him has ever made an effort to verify the quality-control standards at every weather station site.
Until he finishes his project, Watts says, not even Jim Hansen will ever know for sure if -- as a recent scientific paper at the University of Colorado puts it -- "the use of the data from poorly sited stations provides a false sense of confidence in the robustness of the surface temperature trend assessments."
In English, that means Watts may be on the way to proving that the country is not as dangerously hot as we've been led to believe.
******
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Cool news about global warming
You've no doubt seen the stories about strange snowfalls in Saudi Arabia. A brutal winter in China. The heaviest snow cover in North America, Siberia and elsewhere since 1966.
And if you are a vigilant observer of the global warming debate, you know how inconveniently cold it is in the Arctic this winter for Al Gore and his army of climate alarmists.
But how cold is it, Johnny?
Well, NASA says recent satellite images show that the allegedly endangered polar ice cap -- which will melt completely one of these summers and kill off all the polar bears if we don't slash our greedy carbon footprints and revert to the lifestyles of medieval peasants -- has recovered to near normal coverage levels.
That's what Josefino Comiso, a senior research scientist with the Cryospheric Sciences Branch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told Canada's CBC News -- the Canadian government's version of NPR/PBS - on Feb. 12.
As far as Google's search engine knows, Comiso's comforting report has appeared nowhere but in Canada.
There's even better news for polar ice-pack lovers from ice expert Gilles Langis, who says Arctic ice is now even thicker than usual in spots. A senior ice forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, he's another scientist you shouldn't expect to see talking to Anderson Cooper on the next episode of CNN's "Galaxy in Peril."
Meanwhile, in other news too climatically incorrect for U.S. mainstream media to touch, California meteorologist Anthony Watts says January 2008 was the planet's second-coldest January in 15 years.
Even more shocking, the average temperature of Earth dropped significantly from January 2007 to January 2008. As Watts explains on his Web site wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com , he determined the lower figure by crunching data from four major public and private global tracking sources.
You may remember Watts from last summer. He popped up in this paper and on Fox News because of his self-funded project to quality-check 1,221 ground weather stations around the country that are used by NASA to measure the "official" average annual temperature of the United States.
So far, Watts and his volunteers have checked out more than 500 weather stations (none in Western Pennsylvania) to see if their temperature data can be considered credible. As he details on his other Web site, surfacestations.org , nearly 70 percent of the sites fail to meet the government's own standards because they are not 100 feet from a building, are on blazing rooftops, sit next to air-conditioner exhaust fans, etc.
Watts was shocked and surprised to find such unequivocal proof that Earth's temperature has cooled in the last year, he said to me Wednesday. But he's very cautious about what it means in either the short or long run.
Calling it a "fluctuation" and "a large anomaly" compared to the 30-year running temperature average that climatologists use, he emphasized that the cold spell is "no indication that global warming is over" but does "illustrate that the driving mechanisms behind our planet's climate are still very much in control of changing the climate and that the planet's not in the death grip of CO2 just yet."
A careful, honest man of science, all Watts would say for sure was that his findings and all the strange cold-weather events of this winter prove only one thing so far -- that "Mother Nature is still in control of things, not us."
******
May 11, 2008
Sure is ... COOL out there
Who cares what America's "official" average daily surface temperature was in 2007?
So what if it was precisely 54.2 degrees F, as the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration says?
Even if America's temperature is taken with perfect accuracy -- which it definitely is not -- does it really matter if it goes up or down a few tenths of a degree in any given year?
Unfortunately, the answer is yes. A lot.
As long as carbonphobes are using exaggerated fears of a warming globe as an excuse for more laws and more taxes we don't need, America's annual temperature is going to be an important political issue.
The average surface temperature of a huge, geographically diverse country is a meaningless abstraction. Yet each year NOAA figures it out by crunching data from 1,221 small weather stations in places like Uniontown, New Castle and Franklin, Pa.
Getting accurate data from the U.S. Historical Climatology Network -- whose stations, in theory, have been reporting daily high and low temperatures from the same spot and under the same conditions for at least 100 years -- should be a scientific slam-dunk.
But California meteorologist Anthony Watts has found otherwise. He says about 69 percent of the 534 temperature stations he and his volunteers have visually inspected so far can't be trusted because their sensors are placed on concrete slabs, rooftops or other artificial heat sources (see www.surfacestations.org ).
Watts is concerned because many weather stations originally set up in the cool countryside are now in urban areas or, like the one in Uniontown, have been relocated to unnaturally warm sewage treatment plants.
NOAA insists it has always statistically adjusted its data to account for urban-heat-island effects and other variables, yet Watts' quality-checking has worried some folks at NOAA.
NOAA recently announced it will modernize 1,000 stations of its historical network and begin combining its data with data from 114 stations that will compose its new high-tech, more reliable and nearly completed Climate Reference Network.
The idea, NOAA says, is for both networks to work "in tandem to feed consistently accurate, high-quality data to scientists studying climate trends." What a government concept.
In Pittsburgh, Bob Coblentz of the National Weather Service is responsible for maintaining NOAA's weather stations in Uniontown, New Castle and Franklin.
While admitting they are not all sited perfectly, he's confident they have been providing reliable, accurate measurements.
Between 1980 and 2005, NOAA's official charts of annual daily average temperatures show Western Pennsylvania has been warming. Franklin's average daily temperature (in Fahrenheit) was 46.4 degrees in 1980 and in 2005 it was up 3.4 degrees to 49.8. Over the same 25 year period, New Castle rose 3.8 degrees to 51.6 and Uniontown was up 2.5 degrees to 52.4.
If you start with the warmer year of 1990, however, the jaggedy charts tell a different story.
Uniontown's annual daily average temperature was 53 degrees in 1990 but by 2005 it was 52.4, cooler by 0.6 degrees; New Castle's was 51.6 in both 1990 and 2005, while Franklin's fell 1.2 degrees from 51 in 1990 to 49.8 in 2005.
It may or may not mean anything. But while Al Gore and his fellow hysterics have been shouting about global warming, Western Pennsylvania has been experiencing a pleasant regional cooling.