The Fake Climate Record

Tony Heller became a catastrophic man-made global warming opponent soon after he started looking at the US temperature records back in 2006.  His Real Climate Science blog has revealed many aspects of the fraudulent manipulation of data.  He recently recorded a video which provides an excellent overview on the fake temperature records used to change a slowly cooling US temperature trend into a rather strong warming trend.  I will summarize a few key observations he makes and add some discussion.

There is actual measured data at various times going back to 1895 from various subsets of the 1,218 weather stations in the US Historical Climatology Network and then there is the data reported to the public, which has been highly manipulated.  The manipulated data is reported for 1,218 stations, whether those stations existed or were active at the time or not!  First, consider the 1895 to 2023 average daily high temperature for the months June through August for those stations which actually measured the temperature:

The actual reported temperature measurements show a decrease in this summer maximum temperature of about 0.5 degree Fahrenheit from 1895 to 2023 using a least squares linear fit to the data.

Now, here is the data reported to the public based on both those stations that actually reported data and those that did not, but who have been phantom members of the US Historical Climatology Network over varying periods of time, often many decades.  Actual reported data has been manipulated and the data for non-reporting stations has been generated by computer models that assume that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes a 2 degree Fahrenheit temperature increase per century.  Also, the computer model actually propagates urban heat island temperature increases onto the non-reporting stations.

The final result of this massive temperature data manipulation is a least-squares linear temperature increase from 1895 to 2023 of 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit.  A temperature decrease of 0.5 degree F to an increase of 1.2 degree F has been created to fuel the catastrophic man-made global warming fraud.

Tony Heller provides us with a graph showing the manipulated data minus the actual measured data in this graph:

The blue line shows that before about 2010, the temperature record was lowered relative to the actual measurements by as much as 1.5 degree F.  Through about half the total period, the temperature was lowered by 1 degree F or more.  Scientifically, if the actual measurements are so bad that adjustments of this scale are needed, then all of the data is meaningless and useless as far as the issue of whether there is or is not significant man-made global warming. If manipulations of this scale are needed, then the game is over and we have no historical record at all.  The clock is at time zero and a reliable and comprehensive climate station network needs to be constructed and maintained for a century to create the data to see if there actually is any trendline on US and on global temperatures.

At this point in time, a slowly falling temperature seems more believable than a temperature increase rate which is 2.2 times greater than the measured decrease.  I say this based on my belief in actual measurements, but also because I believe that carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations at anywhere near present levels do not cause significant temperature increases as the CO2 concentration increases.  Indeed, additional CO2 in the atmosphere may actually be causing a very slight temperature decrease at present levels.  The warming as a result of CO2 is mostly caused by the first few 10s of ppm.  I wrote about my concern about these cooling effects of carbon dioxide back in 2010.

As Tony Heller points out, the reporting of data for 1,218 stations when many fewer stations have commonly reported measured data is one of the most important degrees of freedom that the manipulators have to recreate a biased temperature record.  Here are the number of stations that reported June to August data historically:

From 1895 to about 1920, the number of stations increased very rapidly, allowing the manipulators to create much station temperature data that existed only in their fervent imaginations. The rate of increase in stations until 1989 was pretty substantial also.  Then after 1989, there has been a very rapid decrease in stations to about 805 stations.  The measured data that is presently going into the data manipulation mill operated by the US federal government is 66% of the stations assigned maximum daily temperatures for June to August.  34% of the stations are "reporting" completely fraudulent data from computer programs with a strong warming bias.  The data from the 66% of stations actually making measurements is also manipulated, though with smaller deviations from reality than that assigned to the non-reporting stations.

The federal government has invested hundreds of billions of dollars into what it calls Climate Science or efforts to mitigate a global crisis of its own invention.  Its funding of research into climate science has set real climate science knowledge back decades.  Its bias for a catastrophic man-made global warming crisis has corrupted the scientific method within this field of study.  Tens of thousands of research papers have been written which are laced with total nonsense.  Many of those papers have valuable results soiled by surrounding nonsense, which will mean that it will be very difficult to believe the valid results.  

But science has not been the only casualty.  The federal government has created a gigantic special interest group (industries, academics, media, environmental groups, and government agencies) seeking money and attention from federal, state, and local governments, not to mention frightened Americans.  Company after company, probably tens of thousands of them, have been created to address the fraudulent problems resulting from the falsified hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming.  The amount of mal-invested human effort is staggering.  The damage to our nation's productivity is a horrible tragedy.  And much of the cost of this will fall on Americans of lower income, many of whom have put too much trust in the leaders of American governments.

Should Joe Biden win a second term, this fraud will continue without abatement.  This grievous con game is strongly supported by the Democratic Party.  If Donald Trump wins a second term, this calumny will at least be constrained.  Trump did not do as good a job of this in his first term as he ought to have.  I sure hope he will do better in his second term, should he get one. At least he states clearly that he does not believe in catastrophic man-made global warming.

Hiding the Decline - Not Since 1997, Since 1921

I have concentrated on revealing the mistakes in the physics that is used to explain the so-called greenhouse effect of infra-red active gases in recent times, because Tony Heller at the blog Real Science has done an excellent job revealing the massive data manipulations in the temperature data.  His plot of the raw thermometer data since 1921 and the highly manipulated and published data since then is shown here:

The raw temperature data over this time shows a decline in the average temperature, while the manipulated data shows a large increase, especially since 1977.  Most of the discussion of a "Pause in the Temperature Increase" is simply addressing the highly manipulated data of the last 17 years, during which time the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased, but the temperature has not.

The thermometer readings come from the USHCN stations across the USA shown on the map below:

The temperature data manipulators claim that much of the earlier 20th Century data has to be shifted downward because the stations reported the same high temperature two days in a row.  Now this assumes that the station managers were incredibly dumb and failed to notice that there was an unbelievable incidence of daily high temperatures that were the same due to the time of day at which they reset the temperature recorders to report the high temperature of that daily time period.  Assuming such overwhelming stupidity of Americans lies at the core to the Progressive Elitist ideology and justifies strong and intrusive rule by politicians and bureaucrats of elevated intelligence and who have been well-indoctrinated in our Progressive education system.

Tony Heller has also revealed that increasing portions of the temperature data record have no actual thermometer temperature reading behind them at all.  More and more often, it is said that the stations do not report the data and so a program runs an algorithm to generate a replacement temperature.  The reason for the failure to report the temperature data is unknown, as is the nature of the algorithm that replaces the missing data with some calculated number.  Tony Heller has provided the following horrifying plot of the rapidly increasing percentage of missing temperature data replaced by the algorithm of our most untrustworthy bureaucrats.

Tony Heller also says that almost all of the temperature increase claimed since 1990 is the result of the temperature data added to the record to replace the missing raw data.  Frankly, I would not be surprised if there was not a concerted effort on the part of the catastrophic man-made warming alarmists to throw out station data that does not fit their agenda of rising temperatures.  In addition, it would not be surprising to find out that the algorithm to replace the missing data is biased to generate hotter temperatures.  In fact, the fact that almost all of the temperature increase since 1990 is due to the algorithm-produced data is proof that the algorithm does have such a bias.

The physics of the catastrophic man-made warming alarmists is dishonest.  The temperature data they publish is dishonest.  Honest temperature data would provide the experimental proof that the theory of catastrophic greenhouse warming was wrong.  The physics knowledge needed to understand why their explanations for the physical basis of catastrophic man-made global warming are wrong is beyond most scientists, let alone the general public.  That fact keeps the alarmist somewhat protected on the theory side of this equation.  But, without the massive fraudulent manipulation of the temperature data on the experimental side of the equation, the massive fraud would be immediately exposed to a much larger fraction of the People.

Obama and much of his Democrat Socialist Party base are still very determined to use this fraud to provide a basis for a massive invasion against individual rights, especially economic rights.  It allows them a reason for further expansion of the control of the People and a rich mother lode for extortion and pilfering of businesses.  Similar special interests are found in countries around the world and the latest Synthesizing Report of the latest IPCC report of the UN shows how committed they are to continuing the fraud.  That fraud is unraveling rapidly now.

One of the many things the new Republican majority in the Senate should make possible is a renewed effort to push along and promote the unraveling of the catastrophic man-made global warming fraud.  I hope the newly re-elected Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma will continue to promote reason and science with respect to man-made global warming, energy, and environmental policies as he has and that he will have many more active allies in the Senate and the House of Representatives.  It is critical to keep the US from signing international treaties on these issues and to maintain our sovereignty and our constitutional management of our internal affairs.  We must not be sucked into UN claims that we must aim toward zero carbon dioxide emissions or the planet is doomed!

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.