Sunday, December 9, 2007

The Truth About Global Temperature...And It Is Not What We Have Been Led To Believe.....

How can anyone say we are experiencing "global warming" when it can not, and is not being accurately measured? (See the following article.) This seems rather fundamental to the question of man-caused global warming. Do we merely watch glaciers melting in the summer, (which they of course always do) and say...."oh my, yes, it is warming")? There has been so much distortion of the reality of normal climate change that many people accept "global warming" as a fact, when it certainly may not be. Catastrophic climate change as a result of global warming? This is a total fallacy and fabrication; the ultimate scandal and swindle of our time. Thank you very much, Mr. "Peace Prize" Al Gore.
Peter



CONTAMINATED DATA: HOT CITIES, NOT CO2, CAUSE URBAN THERMOMETERS TO RISE
Below is the famous graph of "global average surface temperature," or "global temperature" for short. The data come from thermometers around the world, but between the thermometer readings and the final, famous, warming ramp, a lot of statistical modelling aims at removing known sources of exaggeration in the warming trend.

In a new article just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres, a co-author and I have concluded that the manipulations for the steep post-1980 period are inadequate, and the above graph is an exaggeration. Along the way, I have also found that the United Nations agency promoting the global temperature graph has made false claims about the quality of its data.The graph at right comes from data collected in weather stations around the world. Other graphs come from weather satellites and from networks of weather balloons that monitor layers of the atmosphere. These other graphs don't show as much warming as the weatherstation data, even though they measure at heights where there is supposed to be even more greenhouse-gas-induced warming than at the surface. The discrepancy is especially clear in the tropics.

The surface-measured data has many well-known problems. Over the post-war era, equipment has changed, station sites have been moved, and the time of day at which the data is collected has changed.Many long-term weather records come from in or near cities, which have gotten warmer as they grow. Many poor countries have sparse weather-station records and few resources to ensure data quality. Fewer than one-third of the weather stations operating in the 1970s remain in operation.Scientists readily acknowledged that temperature measurements are contaminated for the purpose of measuring climate change. But they argue that adjustments fix the problem.

To deal with a false warming generated by urbanization, they have the "Urbanization Adjustment." To deal with biases due to changing the time of day when temperatures are observed, they have the "Time of Observation Bias Adjustment." And so forth.How do we know these adjustments are correct? In most studies, the question is simply not asked. A few studies argue that the adjustments must be adequate since adjacent rural and urban samples give similar results. But closer inspection shows some of these papers don't actually give similar results at all, or when they do they define "rural" so broadly that it includes partly urbanized places.

Other studies say the adjustments must be adequate because trends on windy nights look the same as trends on calm nights. But the long list of data problems includes issues just as serious under both windy and calm conditions.The papers describing the adjustments aim to construct data showing what the temperature would be in a region if nobody had ever lived there. If the adjustments are right, the final output should not be correlated with the extent of industrial development and variations in socioeconomic conditions. But in a 2004 study with climatologist Patrick Michaels, we found that the adjustment models were not removing the contamination patterns as claimed. If the contamination were removed, we estimated the average measured warming rate over land would decline by about half.

Dutch meteorologists using different data and a different testing methodology had come to the same conclusions.In response to criticisms of our paper, I began assembling a more complete database, covering all available land areas and a more extensive set of climatological and economic indicators. Meantime, in 2005, I was asked to serve as an external reviewer for the IPCC report, which was released earlier this year. I accepted, in part to address the data-contamination problem.

Scientists who attribute warming to greenhouse gases argue that their climate models cannot reproduce the surface trends from natural variability alone. They then attribute it to greenhouse gases, since (they assume) all other human influences have been removed from the data by the adjustment models. If that has not happened, however, they cannot claim to be able to identify the role of greenhouse gases. Despite the vast number of studies involved, and the large number of contributors to the IPCC reports, the core message of the IPCC hinges on the assumption that their main surface climate data set is uncontaminated. And by the time they began writing the recent Fourth Assessment Report, they had before them a set of papers proving the data are contaminated.How did they handle this issue?

In the first draft of the IPCC report, they simply claimed that, while city data are distorted by urban warming, this does not affect the global averages. They cited two familiar studies to support their position and ignored the new counter-evidence. I submitted lengthy comments criticizing this section. In the second draft there was still no discussion, so again I put in lengthy comments. This time the IPCC authors wrote a response. They conceded the evidence of contamination, but in a stunning admission, said: "The locations of socioeconomic development happen to have coincided with maximum warming, not for the reason given by McKitrick and Mihaels [sic] (2004), but because of the strengthening of the Arctic Oscillation and the greater sensitivity of land than ocean to greenhouse forcing, owing to the smaller thermal capacity of land."

Note the irony: Confronted with published evidence of an anthropogenic (but non-greenhouse) explanation for warming, they dismissed it with an unproven conjecture of natural causes. Who's the "denialist" now? Furthermore, the claim is preposterous. The comparison of land and ocean is irrelevant since we were only talking about land areas. The Arctic Oscillation is a wind-circulation pattern that affects long-term weather trends in the Arctic. It certainly plays a role in explaining Arctic warming over the past few decades. But for IPCC lead authors to invoke it to explain a worldwide correlation between industrialization and warming patterns is nonsense.

FULL STORY here

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