Maintaining Climate Change Alarmism: Replacing Cool Weather Station Data with Warm Station Data

Steven Goddard at Real Science has lately had a series of posts on the effects of a very large reduction of temperature data reported from many weather stations since 1990.  The effect of the data loss and its replacement with massaged data, turns out to be a considerable artificial warming effect.  His most recent post is here.

The following plot by Steven Goddard of the older and generally complete temperature data in the USHCN temperature record kept by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) until 1990 shows the separated data from the stations still reporting complete data and compares that to the temperature data, then complete, of the stations which are missing much of their temperature data since 1990:

Clearly the stations reporting complete data since 1990 are the stations that were warmer prior to 1990 than those which have been reporting incomplete data since 1990.  The temperature differences between the two data sets prior to 1990 are very substantial.

In an earlier post, Goddard presented the percentage of the NOAA USHCN temperature data for which there was no raw data in the record by year:

Note the increase in the missing raw temperature data since 1990, which became a particularly rapid increase in lost raw temperatures after 1994.  The rate of loss of raw data is really remarkable in the recent years of stagnant temperature reports, indicating that there is a greater and greater need by the alarmists to hide the cooling that must really be going on of late.

Steven Goddard then presents the data as reported since 1990 from these same two sets of stations on the basis of the raw data that actually was reported in the raw data record.

So it becomes very clear that NOAA is preferentially losing the raw temperature data since 1990 from the cooler stations.  The final massaged data that they report to everyone replaces the missing cooler temperatures with temperatures interpolated geographically from the warmer data from the stations with complete raw temperature data records.  That is, NOAA is not just losing cooler raw temperatures, but it is adding in warmer temperatures as though that comes from the cooler stations!

It is clear that many of the NOAA warm stations are warm because of urban and suburban locations, airport locations, and massive heat absorbing or even heat-emitting objects at the immediate site.  The Urban Heat Island Effect has corrupted much of the NOAA weather station network data.  Far from correcting the data from overly warm sites downward, NOAA is correcting the cooler and usually better station data upward.  See Anthony Watts' recent evaluation of the USHCN weather stations.

Over and over, I am asked scornfully by believers in the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis if I believe that the government and many climate alarmist scientists are lying to us.  There are many temperature records that have clearly been adjusted with great bias of heart to exaggerate or manufacture a warming trend to support this hypothesis.  I have discussed this in many prior posts.  This very interesting sleuthing by Steven Goddard into the NOAA USHCN temperature data and what NOAA has villainously and corruptly done to the temperature record makes it very clear that our government and its scientists are very determinedly lying to us.  Apparently, the lust for power is overwhelming for many government scientists and for many scientists funded by the power lusting government.