Bending the Thermometers

Reader Boballab found this an entire day before it was supposed to be released. It’s a paper written byJoseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts for the Science and Public Policy Institute.

Many of us are familiar with the accusations made by D’Aleo and EM Smith regarding the systematic elimination of colder temperature stations. They claimed that there is specific intent to distort the temperature record to inflate the true temperatures today. Not that hard to believe considering what we’ve recently learned from Climategate and the IPCC, however this paper goes a step further. It’s a comprehensive report on the numerous flaws in the dataset, including surfacestations, data elimination and a variety of other issues.

The report is 111 pages long and to put it simply, it contains the single strongest worded accusations against climate science of anything I’ve read from qualified skeptics. Here’s a quote:

That is to say, leading meteorological institutions in the USA and around the world have so systematically tampered with instrumental temperature data that it cannot be safely said that there has been any significant net “global warming” in the 20th century.

The report is handled on a single page with a summary for policymakers. I would encourage any (both) policymakers who stop by to consider that these claims are being made by qualified people with background and ability to understand the data and implications.

1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.
2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.
3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.
4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.
5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.
6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.
7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.
8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.
9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.
10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.
11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century “global warming”.
12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.
13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.
14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC “chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”
15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.

Thanks again to the omnipresent boballab who’s quick emails allowed Anthony and crew to release the report in an orderly fashion.

Check out the full Damning report thsurface_temp[1]

The original post at the SPPI is here.

Honestly, CO2 does catch/retard/slow down heat. It’s just the truth. More CO2, more warming, however, there is absolutely no guarantee that the warming is enough to be measurable. Our understanding isn’t good enough on how the climate reacts and those that say it is, are not being honest with you.

I’ll stop there because these bastard advocaticians want me to be a denier. They spend every day of their lives messing with reality to an extent that reasonable people have no choice. We want data, we want code, we want truth, the problem is we appear to be asking a bunch of paid liars to give it to us.