Much of the warming measured at the Earth’s surface over the past 125 years stems from temperature measurements from locations with growing urban populations resulting in the “urban heat island” effect biasing the recorded temperatures, a study by a top-flight team of scientists from the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at the University of Alabama recently published in the American Meteorological Society’s peer-reviewed Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology concludes. The study links increasing population density around and near surface station locations with quickly rising temperatures that bias the average temperature measure as a whole. Various official weather recording and reporting agencies in countries around the world have manipulated, adjusted, or “homogenized” surface temperature measurements, supposedly to correct for errors introduced by the technologies. Oddly, these “homogenization” efforts seemingly go in only 1 direction, with past temperatures adjusted downward and present temperatures adjusted upward. That makes the record show a steep warming trend, a steeper trend than has actually been recorded and which plays right into claims that humans are causing a dangerous global warming.
In 2015 researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) blended contaminated ocean temperature data from ships with relatively pristine data recorded by the Argo network of 3,600 floats distributed almost uniformly across the global oceans to provide temperature and salinity profiles from the surface to a depth of 2,000m, reporting an alarming increase in the rate of ocean temperature rise—supposedly refuting an observed long-term pause in rising temperatures. The shenanigans with ocean temperature data were revealed by the award-winning scientist involved in actually ensuring data quality for the agency. Then, in 2019, scientists were forced to admit a mathematical error that undermined claims of fast-rising ocean temperatures. The scientists’ extraordinary claims had slipped right through the peer-review process at the journal Nature.
Surface stations across the US are woefully compromised by the urban heat island effect, the phenomenon where urban areas experience higher temperatures, especially at night, than surrounding rural areas, due to the replacement of natural surfaces with heat-absorbing materials such as concrete and asphalt, and being located near artificial sources of heat such as furnaces, air conditioning units, outdoor grills, and areas of high automobile and/or air traffic. 96% of US temperature stations used to measure temperatures failed to meet NOAA’s and the NWS’s standards for “acceptable” and uncorrupted placement. UHI-biased stations skew the reported average temperature and temperature trends upward. In fact, 30% of the stations sampled were “ghost” stations, locations where no station currently exists, with the reported temperatures being completely made up by the agencies, extrapolated from temperatures recorded at nearby stations.
The method quantifies the sensitivity of Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) station raw temperature to station-centered population density (PD). Specifically, closely spaced station pair differences in monthly raw (non-homogenized) TAVG (the average of daily maximum and minimum temperature) and PD are sorted by station pair average PD into six PD classes, and linear regression estimates of the temperature sensitivity to population density change … are made for each class for historical periods ranging from 1 to 21 years in length. Every one of the resulting six sensitivity relationships in each of 22 historical periods from 1880 to 2020 are found to be positive, and their magnitudes allow construction of station-average urban heat island temperature (TUHI) curves as a function of population density.
The reported temperatures for most of the globe come from surface stations. By any measure, these stations and the temperatures they record are compromised by a variety of factors, including UHI introduced by poor siting and/or population density, homogenization changes that lack transparency, and the fact that some “reported data” comes from stations that simply don’t exist or that have been moved, meaning the data or its continuous trend has simply been made up. That’s certainly not how sound science should be undertaken or reported. Far-reaching, liberty-constraining, economy-impacting public policies should not be based on such a flawed foundation. That’s not sound public policy, especially as climate policies’ champions proclaim themselves to speak for “the science” and demand policymakers follow not the physical science but instead “the political science,” with no questioning or dissent allowed.
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Supplemental Info:
https://brownstone.org/article....s/smell-the-roses-po
