By Andrew Bolt
Once you start digging, there’s no end to the dirt:
Two months after “climategate” cast doubt on some of the science behind global warming, new questions are being raised about the reliability of a key temperature database, used by the United Nations and climate change scientists as proof of recent planetary warming.
Two American researchers allege that U.S. government scientists have skewed global temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada.
In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada. Worse, only one station—at Eureka on Ellesmere Island—is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.
The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada.Yet as American researchers Joseph D’Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, point out in a study published on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute, NOAA uses “just one thermometer [for measuring] everything north of latitude 65 degrees.” …
Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have “cherry picked” the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea—which has a warming effect on winter weather.
Over the past two decades, they say, “the percentage of [Canadian] stations in the lower elevations tripled and those at higher elevations, above 300 feet, were reduced in half.”
Using the agency’s own figures, Smith shows that in 1991, almost a quarter of NOAA’s Canadian temperature data came from stations in the high Arctic. The same region contributes only 3% of the Canadian data today.
UPDATE
Anthony Watts offers a preliminary rebuttal to the US National Climatic Data Center paper that says he’s wrong to say its poorly sited weather stations – many in areas increasingly urbanised or surrounded by more sources of heat – have overestimated recent warming. For a start, the NCDC paper discussed only Watts’ early work on 43 per cent of its network – even though he warned the results were unrepresentative and not yet checked for quality:
The problem is known as the “low hanging fruit problem”. You see this project was done on an ad hoc basis, with no specific roadmap on which stations to acquire. This was necessitated by the social networking (blogging) Dr. Pielke and I employed early in the project to get volunteers. What we ended up getting was a lumpy and poorly spatially distributed dataset because early volunteers would get the stations closest to them, often near or within cities.The urban stations were well represented in the early dataset, but the rural ones, where we believed the best siting existed, were poorly represented. So naturally, any sort of study early on even with a “significant sample size” would be biased towards urban stations…
This is why I’ve been continuing to collect what some might consider an unusually large sample size, now at 87%. We’ve learned that there are so few well sited stations, the ones that meet the CRN1/CRn2 criteria (or NOAA’s 100 foot rule for COOPS) are just 10% of the whole network…
When you have such a small percentage of well sited stations, it is obviously important to get a large sample size, which is exactly what I’ve done. Preliminary temperature analysis done by the Pielke group of the the data at 87% surveyed looks quite a bit different now than when at 43%…
When our paper with the most current data is completed (and hopefully accepted in a journal), we’ll let peer reviewed science do the comparison on data and methods, and we’ll see how it works out. Could I be wrong? I’m prepared for that possibility. But everything I’ve seen so far tells me I’m on the right track.
Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.
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Posted in America (USA), Blundering Bureaucrats, Canada, Climate Alarmists, Climate Change, Environment, Environmental activists, Fear-mongering, Fraud/Waste, Global Warming, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda Tagged: Andrew Bolt, Climate Change Fraud, Climate Change Religion, Climategate, Global Warming Alarmism, Global Warming Hype, Tony, UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 
