The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) operates the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina. This center produces the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), which is a land surface temperature record from around the world. This data set is not just raw temperature data, but is temperature station temperature measurements averaged in a grid across the Earth. This data is supplied to the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University, which performs further data manipulations upon the data. The data was also supplied to the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where their temperature data sets were examined more closely following the dump of many documents that occurred in late November. The fourth most significant set of temperatures comes from Japan, but their database is also based upon the NOAA GHCN temperature database. Despite the use of the same basic set of manipulated data by NOAA, NASA, and the CRU, they used to and often still do pretend that each fully manipulated data set came to very similar conclusions independently.
Recent analysis by computer expert E. Mike Smith and the certified consulting meteorologist Joseph D'Aleo has shown manipulations of the GHCN which have had the effect of greatly exaggerating the rise of temperatures in the late 20th Century, as well as in the first decade of the present century. The analysis was so blatantly designed for that purpose, that it is unavoidable to say that an agency of our government was knowingly lying to the American People and abusing the good name of the United States throughout the world. How was this perfidy performed? I have discussed a number of aspects of this huge effort to distort the temperature data to support a theory of sudden highly unusual temperature rise in the late 20th Century and a sustained high in the first decade of this century in a number of posts in November and December. I will add to that story here.
First, the GHCN was based on a few tens of reporting stations until about 1870, then the number grew rapidly until about 1920 when it was more than 1300 stations. There was another growth in the number in the late 1940s with more than 1700 stations reporting temperatures. About 1970 the numbers started to drop, but remained above 1500 until about 1990. In the late 1990s, the number of temperature readings entered into the GHCN database dropped precipitously to a few hundred, though the number of stations still reporting data did not drop anywhere near so rapidly. E. Mike Smith and Joseph D'Aleo show that the high altitude and high latitude station data was preferentially dropped from the data set, as was rural data. The weight of the reported data stations moved south in the northern hemisphere as well. More coastal and more airport (hardly ever close to cities, right?) station data was included. Colder stations were systematically not entered into the data set. To make up for the missing data in many grids around the world, temperature values were made up for those grids based on stations as far as 1200 km away. Thus mountain data might be based on the data of two cities with large urban heat island effects. See the story as told by Joseph D'Aleo here and by E. Mike Smith here.
The GHCN data shows warming in only a fraction of the reported grid areas and they are mostly in the higher latitudes and in mountainous regions. I earlier discussed the effect on Russia. D'Aleo notes that:
In Canada the number of stations dropped from 600 to 35 in 2009. The percentage of stations in the lower elevations (below 300 feet) tripled and those at higher elevations above 3000 feet were reduced in half. Canada’s semi-permanent depicted warmth comes from interpolating from more southerly locations to fill northerly vacant grid boxes, even as a pure average of the available stations shows a COOLING. Just 1 thermometer remains for everything north of latitude 65N – that station is Eureka. Eureka according to Wikipedia has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to the flora and fauna abundant around the Eureka area, more so than anywhere else in the High Arctic. Winters are frigid but summers are slightly warmer than at other places in the Canadian Arctic.
China had 100 stations in 1950, over 400 in 1960 then only 35 by 1990. Temperatures reflected these station distribution changes. CRU’s own Phil Jones showed in 2008 peer review paper that contamination by urbanization in China was 1.8F per century. Neither NOAA nor CRU adjusts for this contamination. NASA to their credit, makes an attempt to adjust for urbanization, but outside the United States, the lack of updated population data has NASA adjusting cities with data from other cities with about as many stations warming as cooling.
High elevation stations have disappeared from the data base. Stations in the Andes and Bolivia have vanished. Temperatures for these areas are now determined by interpolation from stations hundreds of miles away on the coast or in the Amazon.
Of course, other adjustments have been applied to the measured temperature data, with the data shown to the public being only this data. These adjustments are often times made frequently and are undocumented. I previously discussed a comparison of so-called unadjusted data for Central Park and data which was said to be adjusted, but it turns out that even unadjusted data is not raw temperature data. From D'Aleo,
The older temperatures were adjusted downward, as though fewer people were on Manhattan Island and less energy was used in earlier times than now! Similar adjustments were made to some so-called rural stations also. Here is the result for Davis, California, the nearest "rural" station to San Francisco, though it is a town of more than 60,000 people and is a suburb of Sacramento. The recent drop of reported stations has resulted in only 4 stations for the entire state of California. Three of those stations are along the coast in the Los Angeles area and the Davis station is the only one left in the mid-latitudes of the state. So, what has NOAA done to the only reported station in the recent record outside of the coastal LA area?
The pre-1960 data was adjusted downward to change a net cooling after about 1908 into a net warming. This would possibly make sense if the population of Davis and nearby Sacramento had been much larger in 1880 and then they had shrunk in size drastically until 1960, when the population became stable. But, that certainly did not happen, now did it? Now, if you are going to represent the large state of California with only 4 station temperature histories in recent times and you want to tell everyone that there has been no cooling since 1998, this is a great way to do it. Drop all the station readings in the mountains of CA and drop those from the northern third of the state entirely only for those pesky recent times when the catastrophic AGW theory says temperatures must remain high. Keep the many cooler station temperature inputs, of course, for earlier times so that the temperature record will have a recent rise. Having stations which are really in urban areas is the way to go and the manipulations are time consuming enough that you do not want to have to do them on too many station's temperature data, so just keep a few urban results.
There is a huge pattern of falsifying the temperature record performed by our own government for the purpose of misleading the American People and the people of the rest of the world. This is a blatant power grab by the government to tax, regulate, and limit the use of energy. This data provides the justification for the EPA to condemn CO2 as a pollutant and to heavily regulate all energy users. It is an excuse to offer subsidies and mandates to favor certain alternative energy industries and certain so-called green companies. These industries and companies can be counted upon to offer frequent bribes, called campaign contributions, to the politicians who gain this power. This data is also the basis for an increase in effective world governance of Americans by a UN dominated by governments which do not hold the rights of the individual as sovereign or even worthy of respect. This fraud has been perpetrated for the purpose of advancing socialism and world government.
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