"Seon Ferguson" <seo
...@gmail.com> wrote in message
> Yeah one area of the planet. Why don't you talk about global temperatures?
I do, and they come mostly from highly urbanised areas
Rural stations show no warming!
US Temperature Records And Therefore Global Records Are Unreliable
It appears that global warming is a figment of the imagination propagated by
a warming bias in the temperature measurements.
QUOTE: we found that 89 percent of the stations - nearly 9 of every 10 -
fail to meet the National Weather Service's own siting requirements that
stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial
heating or radiating/ reflecting heat source.
QUOTE: The conclusion is inescapable: The US temperature record is
unreliable.
The errors in the record exceed by a wide margin the purported rise in
temperature of 0.7º C (about 1.2º F) during the twentieth century.
Consequently, this record should not be cited as evidence of any trend in
temperature that may have occurred across the US during the past century.
QUOTE: Since the US record is thought to be "the best in the world," it
follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and
unreliable.
QUOTE: The most frequent siting issue was proximity to artificial heating or
radiative heat surfaces.
QUOTE: With only 11 percent of surveyed stations being of acceptable
quality, the raw temperature data produced by the USHCN stations are not
sufficiently accurate to use in scientific studies or as a basis for public
policy decisions. Adjustments to the data by NOAA/NCDC and NASA add
significant additional warming biases, which compound the errors present
from localized site biases.
Executive Summary
Global warming is one of the most serious issues of our times. Some experts
claim the rise in temperature during the past century was "unprecedented"
and proof that immediate action to reduce human greenhouse gas emissions
must begin.
Other experts say the warming was very modest and the case for action has
yet to be made.
The reliability of data used to document temperature trends is of great
importance in this debate. We can't know for sure if global warming is a
problem if we can't trust the data.
The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes
from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National
Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA).
Until now, no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality
of the measurement environment of those stations.
During the past few years I recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to
visually inspect and photographicallydocument more than 860 of these
temperature stations.
We were shocked by what we found.
We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning
units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot
rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We
found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process
of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding
areas.
In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations - nearly 9 of every 10 -
fail to meet the National Weather Service's own siting requirements that
stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial
heating or radiating/ reflecting heat source.
In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising
temperatures because they are badly sited.
It gets worse.
We observed that changes in the technology of temperature stations over time
also has caused them to report a false warming trend. We found major gaps in
the data record that were filled in with data from nearby sites, a practice
that propagates and compounds errors. We found that adjustments to the data
by both NOAA and another government
agency, NASA, cause recent temperatures to look even higher.
The conclusion is inescapable: The US temperature record is unreliable.
The errors in the record exceed by a wide margin the purported rise in
temperature of 0.7º C (about 1.2º F) during the twentieth century.
Consequently, this record should not be cited as evidence of any trend in
temperature that may have occurred across the US during the past century.
Since the US record is thought to be "the best in the world," it follows
that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable.
This report presents actual photos of more than 100 temperature stations in
the US, many of them demonstrating vividly the siting issues we found to be
rampant in the network. Photographs of all 865 stations that have been
surveyed so far can be found at www.surfacestations.org, where station
photos can be browsed by state or searched for by name.
1. Whitewash versus Latex
The research project described in this report was the result of pure
serendipity. It began when I set out to study the
effect of paint changes on the thermometer shelters, known as Stevenson
Screens, used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's
National Weather Service (NOAA/NWS) to track changes in the climate of the
US
I had known for a number of years, from my early work in the 1970s
with weather instrumentation, that when the US Weather Bureau was
commissioned in 1890, it used an instrument shelter designed by Thomas
Stevenson (1818-1887), a British civil engineer (and father of the author
Robert Louis Stevenson).
That wood-slatted box design included a coating of whitewash (slaked lime in
water), which was a common outdoor coating of that era. When dried, it
leaves a pure white coating of calcium carbonate on the wood surface.
Whitewash was still specified as the coating of choice for Stevenson
Screens until 1979, when the National Weather Service (NWS), now
an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA), made a specification change to switch the surface coating
from whitewash to semigloss latex paint.
Latex paints have significantly different infrared properties due to the
pigment, titanium dioxide, which differs from the calcium carbonate-based
whitewash.
I wondered if this change might affect the temperature readings inside the
Stevenson Screens. In the spring of 2007, having time on my hands for the
first time in years, I set off to find the answer.
I purchased three new Stevenson Screen thermometer shelters, shown
in Figure 2. One is bare wood, unpainted, as a control; the middle one is
painted with latex, as sent by the supplier; and the third is painted with
a historically accurate (for early twentieth century) whitewash mixture
that I obtained (both materials and formula) from the head chemist at the
National Lime Company.
Whitewash was mixed after conferring with chemist Richard Godbey of the
Chemical Lime Company in Henderson, Nevada, and after reading a
paper he authored on the history and home creation of whitewash.1
The device on the tripod, also shown in Figure 2, is a stacked plate
infrared thermometer shield with a small fan to pull air through, called an
aspirated shield. I placed it at the same exposure height as the thermistors
(electronic temperature sensors) in the screens and used it as the air
temperature reference. Each Stevenson Screen and the air temperature
reference sensor were fitted with matched, calibrated thermistors, National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) traceable with calibration
certificates, which were connected to a calibrated data-logger, also with a
calibration certificate.
The resolution is .01º F with an accuracy of +/- 0.1º F over the range.
1. P. Mold and R. Godbey, "Limewash: Compatible Coverings for Masonry and
Stucco," International Building Lime Symposium 2005,
Orlando, Florida, March 9-11, 2005, http://www.lime.org/BLG/Mold.pdf.
This test showed that changes to the surface coatings did
make a difference in the temperatures recorded in these
standard thermometer shelters, shown in Figure 3.
I found a 0.3º F difference in maximum temperature and a 0.8º F
difference in minimum temperature between the whitewashand
latex-painted screens. This is a big difference, especially
when we consider that the concern over anthropogenic
global warming was triggered by what these stations
reported was an increase of about 1.2º F over the entire
twentieth century.
2. Story of Three Stations
Next, I set out to determine if the Stevenson Screens of the
US network of temperature-monitoring stations had been
updated to latex paint as required by NWS specification
changes in 1979.
I discovered that a specific network of
stations existed for the purpose of climate monitoring, called
the US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN). The
National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) calls the USHCN
"a high quality, moderate-sized dataset of daily and monthly
records of basic meteorological variables from over 1000
observing stations across the 48 contiguous United States."2
This seemed like a good place to start my investigation of
the whitewash versus latex issue, particularly since there
were three stations near my town of Chico, California
within easy driving distance.
I set out to check the paint on the Stevenson Screens at these locations to
see if they had indeed been converted to latex from whitewash. The first
station, at the Chico University Experiment Farm, had been
converted to latex, but it also contained a surprise.
It had two screens, one of which was converted to automated radio
reporting. I was surprised to find NWS had installed the
radio electronics just inches from the temperature sensor,
inside the screen. (See Figure 4.) Surely this station's
temperature readings would
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