There is NO climate emergency! by Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris

There is NO climate emergency!

Climate models predict disaster – but real world evidence shows no such thing

Dr. Jay Lehr & Tom Harris

Speaking at the 13th International Conference on Climate Change, held July 25 in Washington, DC, Dr. Roy W. Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville said: “There is no climate crisis. Even if all the warming we’ve seen in any observational dataset is due to increasing CO2 (carbon dioxide), which I don’t believe it is, it’s probably too small for any person to feel in their lifetime.”

And yet, that same month, Democrat Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Earl Blumenauer and Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a non-binding resolution that demands a “national, social, industrial and economic mobilization” – to “halt, reverse, mitigate and prepare for the consequences of the climate emergency, and to restore the climate for future generations.” Six Democrat presidential candidates immediately supported the resolution, as a way to spur “sweeping reforms” to stem a “dangerous rise in global temperatures.”

In their view, apparently, asserting a climate emergency makes it a reality and justifies national or even global control and transformation of our energy, social, industrial, economic, legal and social systems.

Thus, in an effort to drum up support for its costly “carbon tax,” the Liberal government of Canada has also declared a climate emergency. So has Britain’s Parliament, to back up a call by opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn for “rapid and dramatic action” to protect the environment , following weeks of protests by the Extinction Rebellion climate movement, the Reuters News Agency reported.

The Climate Mobilization group proclaimed that “Over 790 local governments in 17 countries have declared a climate emergency and committed to action to drive down emissions at emergency speed.”

In considering whether this makes any sense, let’s take a page out of Blumenauer’s book and, as he put it, “tell the truth about the nature of this threat.”

The so-called emergency is based on nothing but the over-active imaginations of activists who put too much faith in computer model forecasts, while ignoring historic records and observational data that tell us nothing extraordinary or unprecedented is happening – and demonstrate that the models are wrong.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies asserts that between 1880 and 2017 there has been only slightly more than 1 degree C (1.8 F) rise in the so-called global average temperature, despite a supposed 40% rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) database of state-wide extreme weather records, arguably the best of its kind in the world, shows that so far in 2019 only one weather record has been set: the lowest temperature in Illinois history.

In 2018, the only records set were: the largest hailstone in Alabama history; the most rainfall in a 24-hour period in Hawaii; and the most precipitation in one year in Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and West Virginia. Many of these records broke, sometimes barely, records that had stood for many decades. 

In 2017, the only record set was for the fastest wind gust in California. No records were set in 2016. In 2015, only two records: the most precipitation in a year in Arkansas and the largest hailstone in Illinois history. In 2014, only one record: the most rainfall in a 24-hour period in New York.

And so it goes, year after year, as we move into the past with the occasional state record set, as one would expect due to natural climate variability. In the first 18+ years of the 21st century, only two states recorded their maximum temperatures: South Carolina in 2012 and South Dakota in 2006. Contrast that with 1936, when 15 states set their all-time maximum temperature records.

Meanwhile, NOAA’s updated coastal sea level tide gauge data for 2016 show no evidence that the rate of sea level rise is accelerating. Seas are rising no faster than they have for many decades.

NOAA’s hurricane records go back to 1851. The data show that for almost 12 consecutive years – October 24, 2005 (after Wilma) until August 25, 2017 (Harvey) – not one major or moderate (Category 3-5) hurricane made landfall in the continental United States. That is the longest such period in history. In 2018, for the first time ever, not one “violent” (F4-5) tornado touched down in the United States.

To the great frustration of climate alarmists, the real-world instrumental record clearly shows that, not only is no climate emergency underway, but today’s climate is actually quite stable. Aside from the drive for world socialism, the climate scare is based on only one thing: computer model forecasts of what some say could happen someday if we do not restrict our use of fossil fuels to reduce CO2 emissions.

However, the models do not work. That’s because they focus predominantly on greenhouse gases, and because scientists do not understand planetary climate processes well enough to know what mathematical equations to program into the models. Observations demonstrate that the actual rate of warming between 1979 and 2017 is one-third of what the average of 102 different climate models predicted. In fact, that climate model average is now almost one full degree Fahrenheit above what satellites have measured!

It is also important to realize that your own local weather forecasts just one week ahead are accurate only half the time. Let’s drill a bit deeper into this scandal.

For the better part of three decades, governments have financed more than one hundred efforts to model our planet. They continue to do so even though none of the models has been able to recreate (hindcast) the known past, or after a decade of study accurately predict what was to happen just ten years later.

People are led astray, because generally speaking, the public has no clue what mathematical models actually are, how they work, and what they can and cannot do. To provide a simple insight into this complex subject, before we build airplanes or buildings, we make small scale physical models and test them against the stress and performances that will be required of them when they are actually built.

When dealing with systems that are totally beyond our control, we try to describe them with computer programs or mathematical equations that we hope may give answers to questions we have about how the system works today and in the future. We attempt to understand the variables that affect the system’s operation. Then we alter the variables and see how the outcomes are affected. This is called sensitivity testing and is the very best use of mathematical models.

Historically, we were never foolish enough to make economic decisions based on predictions calculated from equations we think might control how nature works. Perhaps the most active area for mathematical modeling is the economy and stock market. No one has ever succeeded in getting it right, and they have far fewer variables than Earth’s climate, which is governed by many powerful natural forces.

Yet, today, in the climate sphere, we are doing just that – and using the models to justify massive changes in our energy and economic systems. While no one knows all the variables affecting climate, there are likely hundreds of them. Here are some important factors for which we have limited understanding:

1) seasonal, annual and decadal changes in solar irradiation; 2) energy flows between the ocean and atmosphere; 3) energy flows between the air and land; 4) balance between Earth’s water, water vapor and ice; 5) the impacts of clouds, both trapping heat below and preventing solar radiation from reaching Earth; 6) understanding the planet’s ice; 7) changes in mass among ice sheets, seal levels and glaciers; 8) our ability to factor in hurricanes and tornadoes; 9) the impact of vegetation on temperature; 10) tectonic movements on ocean bottoms; 11) differential rotation between Earth’s surface and its core; and 12) solar system magnetic field and gravitational interactions.

Despite this vast uncertainty, today’s modelers claim they can forecast our planet’s climate for decades or even a century in the future – by looking primarily or solely at “greenhouse gases.” And they want our leaders to manage our energy, economic, agricultural, transportation and other systems accordingly.

Yes, there is a climate-related emergency. It is the threat to our way of life in the free democratic world – imposed on us by climate alarmists, many of whom do not really care about climate change, people or the environment. It is an assault no less frightening and damaging than the wars that have plagued mankind since the dawn of time. It’s time for people and governments to stand up to the power-hungry alarmists.

Dr. Jay Lehr is Senior Policy Advisor with of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute, in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Tom Harris is Executive Director of ICSC and a policy advisor to Heartland.    

Hiding the Warm Past to Build Climate Alarmism

Tony Heller at Real Climate Science has provided another interesting post on how NASA GISS makes a practice of hiding the warm past to build the case for climate alarmism.  Here is how NASA GISS has massaged the data over time to leave out earlier, warmer parts of the climate record, cool the more distant past data with adjustments (fudges), and warm the recent past (despite increased urban heat island effects):

It is not the measurements that count, it is the result you want that counts at NASA.  This adulteration of governmental records should land these people in prison, as a reader, Tom Anderson, has pointed out in his comments from time to time.

Some might argue that the temperature data has not been accurate and it needs various corrections.  If corrections of this size are actually needed, then the data is simply not useful for the purpose of making decisions about the spending of hundreds of billions of dollars or tens of trillions of dollars and for the purposes of deciding which industries will be murdered and which will be subsidized.  I would argue that the corrections made are more likely to be of the opposite sign than the reality  of man-made effects on the local temperatures around weather stations justifies.

The Washington Post Again Falsely Trumpets Global Warming Alarm

Update:  The article in the Washington Post, whose arguments I tear to shreds in this post, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for 2020 for:

Explanatory Reporting

Staff of The Washington Post

For a groundbreaking series that showed with scientific clarity the dire effects of extreme temperatures on the planet.

Complete nonsense is Pulitzer Prize worthy in the minds of the elitist collectivist left who make these awards.

Now my post of 18 August 2019 describing the intellectual fraud begins:

The August 14, 2019 Washington Post had a front page, above the fold article which continues to fill the entirety of pages A10 and A11:

This article is also posted on-line here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climate-environment/climate-change-america/?noredirect=on

There is a salient bias exhibited here.  The temperature change is measured from 1895 to 2018.  Why is 1895 the starting time for that measurement?  Because 1895 was a very cold year.  Let us examine the average US temperature plot below by Statistica:

The average temperature in 1895 was 50.34⁰F and in 2018 it was 53.53⁰F, so the temperature difference was 3.19⁰F or 1.77⁰C.  Had the Washington Post chosen to start the comparison in 1900 when the average US temperature was 52.77⁰F, then the increase in average temperature from then to 2018 would be 0.76⁰F or 0.42⁰C.  Now no one seriously believes that man-made global warming caused 1900 to be 2.43⁰F or 1.35⁰C warmer than 1895.  So, a change of weather, not a change of climate was the likely cause of this substantial difference in temperature over a 5 year period.  But this 5-year change is 67.5% of the 2⁰C temperature change that the Washington Post, on the authority of the UN, is claiming is a critically disastrous temperature increase.  The choice of a particularly cold starting point for a comparison of temperatures is a common trick of the alarmist game-plan.

The warmest spots on the map from the Washington Post article are about 3⁰C warmer relative to 1895.  Subtract the 1.35⁰C difference in the average temperatures to shift to a 1900 starting point in time and there are no spots in the U.S. with a 2⁰C increase relative to 1900.

There is a second interesting problem which is revealed by the map itself.  Carbon dioxide is always said to be a well-mixed atmospheric gas by the catastrophic man-made global warming crowd.  While it actually is not as well-mixed as they represent it to be, its variations are nonetheless gradual and spread over large areas.  Yet, the hot spots in the Washington Post U.S. map are in very much smaller sized areas.  If the warmer areas are warmer due to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, then those areas should be of much larger dimensions than those of the map.  The strong temperature differences in the map are much too localized and suggest that they are due to chaotic weather differences, not real climate differences.

Further examination of the U.S. temperature change map shows a large area in the Southeastern U.S. where the temperature has actually cooled since 1895 as shown in the light green color.  If one maintains that the warming of 3⁰C in some small areas is due to an increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere since 1895, then isn't the near 1⁰C cooling in the Southeastern U.S. also due to that same increase in carbon dioxide?  The larger area and more gradual changes in the cooled area is a better match for the somewhat well-mixed carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere.  There actually are cooling effects due to carbon dioxide as I have many times pointed out in prior articles.  Those who have greatly exaggerated the warming effect of CO₂, claim the cooling effects are insignificant.  Remove the exaggeration of the warming effect and the several cooling effects are not so trivial and many of them are not saturating or saturating as rapidly with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide as is the warming effect.  I am not actually claiming that the cooling in the Southeast is due to carbon dioxide.  It is unlikely that it is.  However, if you are in the business of assuming that the temperature change since 1895 is due to carbon dioxide, then you ought to consider its cooling effects also.

Some of the hottest areas are near our two largest metropolitan areas, New York City and Los Angeles.  Perhaps these areas have warmed due to the urban heat island effect since 1895?  Virtually all the growth of population in southern California and in Arizona around Phoenix has occurred since 1895, undoubtedly contributing to that major hot spot in the Washington Post temperature map.  The article is full of stories about the warming of the state of New Jersey.  Averaging the population of that state from the 1890 and 1900 U.S. Census results to estimate the 1895 population, the 1895 population was about 1,660,000 people.  With the advent of automobiles, it became possible for people working in New York City and in Philadelphia to live in New Jersey, so those metropolitan areas expanded far into New Jersey.  The population of New Jersey in the 2015 estimate is 8,958,000, which is a increase by a factor of about 5.4 times compared to the 1895 population.  There are extensive urban heat island effects in New Jersey as a result.  The article bewails the fact that the only state in the contiguous 48 states with an average temperature increase above 2⁰C is little Rhode Island.  Its population in 1895 was about 387,000 people, which by 2015 has increased to about 1,056,300.  This factor of 2.7 increase in population in this high population density state has most likely also been accompanied by a significant urban heat island effect.  The warmer area around Miami is another area affected by a very large population increase since 1895.

Many of the areas showing the larger increases in temperature are also low population areas such as that on the California - Oregon border and southeastern Oregon, the area on the Utah - Colorado border, most of Maine, and the stretch across northern Michigan, northern Minnesota, most of North Dakota, and northern Montana.  An examination of the number and quality of weather stations in these areas used to generate this data might turn up interesting results.  Could it be the case that these high temperature areas are largely projections of temperatures outside these areas?  In any case, since the population density is low in these areas, any affects on humans is also likely to be low.  These are not particularly warm areas in the first place, so any warming that does occur is quite likely to be welcome.

Outside of the warmer areas of the Southwest and a small area around Miami, most of the areas showing the most warming since 1895 are rather cool parts of the U.S.  Given that Americans are much inclined to take vacations in warmer climes during the winters from such areas as the Northeast whose warmer winters since 1895 are much decried in the Washington Post article, it is hard to see the warming of such cooler parts of the U.S. as a general disaster.  People upon retirement still move to much warmer parts of the U.S. such as Florida and Arizona.  Apparently, they rather like warmth, however the Washington Post may pretend that warmth is a catastrophe.

Yes, it may be true, as lamented in the article, that ice cannot be cut from northern New Jersey lakes as it used to be for ice boxes, but then again we now have refrigerators. If we did not have refrigerators, the disappearance of that northern New Jersey ice might be a disaster.  Perhaps the Washington Post wants us to lose the use of electricity and to force us to return to the use of ice boxes as a result. In that context, it is a disaster that this return to primitivism in the name of radical environmentalism may be harder to accomplish.  This is not one of my goals and I do not believe it is a goal of most Americans either.

I have carried out the above discussion generally accepting the temperature record data provided by the Washington Post article.  However, the thermometer temperature data of 1895 and of 1900 has been heavily adjusted downward and recent data has been heavily adjusted upward by NASA GISS.  The U.S. temperature data given below is based on the USHCN2 historical network, which adjusts recent thermometer readings upwards by a substantial amount before releasing the data to the public.  Here is a comparison of the high and low daily temperature results for the measured or unadjusted data compared to the adjusted data, as discovered by Tony Heller in a 2010 post on Real Science:

The fact that this data cuts off about a decade earlier than 2018, makes little difference, since the temperature has changed very little in the last decade.  More of the country has cooled both at night and during the day since 1895 than has warmed according to the unadjusted measurement data. Parts of the Northeast have still warmed, as has much of the Southwest, including southern California.  There is some warming along the Utah - Colorado border, parts of northern Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana.  But most of the Southeast, the Midwest, and the Central and Southern Plains states have cooled.  Nighttime temperatures have cooled less and warmed more than daytime temperatures, which is generally a good thing in that the daily temperature differential is slightly decreased.

This Washington Post article by four of their radical Climate Change writers, is an excellent lesson in the massive dishonesty of the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmist faction.  There is no attempt to distinguish the general warming of the post Little Ice Age period from any real effects that might be caused by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  There is nothing but assumption that the official data warming since the particularly cold year of 1895 has been due to man's use of organic fuels.  They are most insistent that mankind should feel a strong, collective sense of guilt that it is destroying the Earth and the future of mankind.  This is baloney.  It is moldy, rotten baloney.

It is a very sad observation that so many Americans actually believe in this irrational nonsense.  It is even sadder that every scientist in the nation is not working hard to reveal this con game.  Quite a few of them are on the take and many of them are intimidated by the lockstep socialism, political correctness, and radical environmentalism of our academic institutions and most of our information media.

An Update on the Temperature Record Fudging Scandal

James Rust, a retired professor of nuclear engineering and now a Heartland Institute adviser, has written a good summary of the Earth surface temperature record fudging scandal.  NOAA (USHCN) and NASA GISS in the USA and the University of East Anglia with the MET office (Hadcrut) in the United Kingdom have basically adjusted earlier temperature records downward and increased the more recently measured temperatures despite increased urban heat island effects systematically to support the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  Yet, even with these unjustified temperature record adjustments, there has been no increase in temperatures since 1998 even as the computer models for the climate have predicted major temperature increases based on a continued rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.  What is more, the adjusted surface temperature record over the satellite monitored lower troposphere temperature record period do not now agree well at all and the satellite record is clearly more reliable.

As the ClimateGate e-mails clearly revealed, there is a conspiracy to destroy the science of the climate with fraudulent data and fraudulent and vague theories in order to support a grab by governments for evermore political power.  Scientists with the integrity to oppose this destruction of science and its reputation are being brutally hunted down and subjected to character assassination and career destruction.

Those politicians who are opposing the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmist fraud are being opposed with great vigor by those political organizations seeking to impose draconian restrictions on the use of fossil fuels as well.  Obama's Organizing for Action non-profit and community organizing project has named the politicians it is most interested in going after because they are skeptical of catastrophic man-made global warming.

Obama's Climate Action Plan is given here.

The European Union is backing a plan that calls for a 60% reduction in "greenhouse gas" emissions compared to 2010 by the year 2050 throughout the world.  One of the many absurd results of this policy is that even if the developed nations reduced their emissions to zero, developing nations would have to reduce their emissions 38% below current levels!  The alarmists are completely divorced from all aspects of reality, both scientifically and economically.  If the developing nations are to have any chance of improving their standard of living, it will have to depend upon an increased use of fossil fuels.

NOAA is Fountainhead of Exaggerated Temperature Data

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.

The scalawags and scoundrels of NOAA and NASA must be kicked out of the government for fraud and denied their pensions and benefits.  The EPA administrators who claimed CO2 was a pollutant based on their data showed sufficiently bad judgment that they should be demoted to GS9 level positions.  Those in the House of Representatives who voted for carbon cap and trade should all be turned out of office in the 2010 election for their awful judgment.  Any Congressman who was willing to do so much damage to the American economy and to destroy so many jobs on the basis of such flim-flam artistry has no business making our critical national legislation.  Those Senators who have supported the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis as being correct, should also be retired.  Such fools should never be permitted such power.

Rural US Sites Show No Temperature Increase Since 1900

Using data downloaded from NASA GISS and picking rural sites near, but not too near, to urban sites, a comparison has been made of the temperature trend over time of the rural sites compared to those of the urban sites.  28 pairs of sites across the U.S. were compared.  The paired rural site is from 31 to 91 km from the urban site in each pair.  The result is that urban and rural sites were similar in 1900, with the urban sites slightly higher.  The urban sites have shown an increase in temperatures since then.  The rural sites show no such temperature increase and appear to be generally unchanging with only ups and downs localized in time.  Over a 111 year time span, the urban sites temperatures have risen to be about 1.5C warmer than the rural sites.  So, the much touted rising temperatures in the U.S. are due to the urban heat island effect and not due to a global warming such as has been proposed to be caused by human emissions of CO2 due to the combustion of fossil fuels.

You should find this video very interesting:



I find myself wondering how the scientists at NASA GISS have been such proponents of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis given this temperature data.  It sure seems insane that the EPA has declared CO2 a pollutant, which it will suppress vigorously with command and control tactics.  It is clear that there is no problem caused by CO2 emissions to be addressed.  Waxman-Markey carbon cap and trade type bills and EPA regulations on CO2 as a pollutant are nothing but the politics of Mass Destruction leveled upon American industries and households by the party of massive power lust, the Socialist Democrat Party.

As the fable of man-made global warming due to man's CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels continues to unravel, the American People are going to become ever more untrusting of the Democrats, the print and non-cable media, and, unfortunately, scientists.  Those who have failed to earn our trust generally have some common characteristics.  They are elitists, socialists, and man-hating environmentalists.  When these same people propose to overhaul our health care system, to regulate the financial industry, increase the minimum wage rate, promote labor unions, increase deficit spending, and increase taxes, we should be sure to remember how unreliable their judgment was on the issue of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.  Not only is there no looming catastrophe, but there is no such problem at all!  They have created a phantom problem to justify a huge power grab.

There is a dirty secret behind the scientific side of this scandal.  As the universities have become more and more hotbeds of socialism and political correctness, the scientists who receive federal funding for their research at those socialist/environmentalist/elitist/political correctness hotbeds have not wanted to be left out.  Once, they were more objective and more scientific than the so-called social scientists and the humanities faculty.  Most of this difference has now disappeared because we have so long allowed the lunatic left to run our universities and our government funding agencies.  The scientists are now about as engaged in the cause of advancing socialism/elitism/radical environmentalism/political correctness as is the rest of the faculty at our universities and our government-run laboratories and institutions.

Many say this catastrophic man-made global warming conspiracy could not possibly happen, but they greatly underestimate the power of the socialist control of our once proud institutions of objective learning and study.  They are massively corrupt now.  When we clean house of the politicians in Washington and most of our state capitals, we also need to find a way to clean house in our universities and government laboratories and institutions.  We need real scientists, not socialist pretenders.

Postscript added on 29 January 2010:

Some people have assumed that I made the video above.  This is not the case.  I was impressed by the effort and I thought it was most likely a science fair project which was unlikely to be blemished by artifices and was probably a fairly straightforward treatment of readily available data, so others could readily check up on these results.  It was a challenge to others to see if they could show the same thing as was claimed in this video.  I wish I could tell everyone who did make this video.  They deserve credit for it.

My own assessment of the bad science backing the theory of catastrophic global warming due to man's emissions of CO2 is very broad-based and is not dependent upon the reproducibility of the results in this video.  However, analyses of temperature data from many other areas of the world are showing similar results and I am more inclined to believe than not that if unbiased scientists examine the data as this father and son did, they will find that any increase in U.S. temperatures in rural areas is much less than the alarming results claimed by the advocates of catastrophic AGW.  The urban heat island effect is large and most of the data in the U.S. database is heavily affected by that.  I live and work between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, where the temperature is higher due to the urban heat island effect.  Nonetheless, the temperatures recorded at Baltimore-Washington International Airport and at Reagan Washington National Airport are commonly 2 or 3 degrees Fahenheit higher than those at my laboratory or home.