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.

Governmental Exaggeration of the Increase in Global Temperature

The federal government has systemically increased the global surface temperature record to suit its purpose of claiming that catastrophic man-made global warming has occurred.  Among examples I have pointed out in the past are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for instance.  Steven Goddard at Real Science has just posted an interesting comparison of the surface temperature record used by James Hansen in 1981 with that claimed by GISS now.  He took the two sets of data and normalized them to various dates to show how they differed over other periods of time.  The plot I like the most is the normalization to 1895 which I show below with the black line the data Hansen used in 1981 and the red line the newer, adjusted data of GISS:

Note that the data taken from 1880 to 1940 has curious changes, but no large and continuing differences from the data used earlier.  This would seem to be a concession that the 1880 to 1940 data had only small errors in it.  Then strangely the data from 1940 to 1980 must have originally been very bad and required a large upward adjustment of the temperature record by GISS.  Now one possible reason for an increasing and large adjustment might be a rapidly growing human population that would cause temperatures at recording stations to be falsely elevated when they were too near high population areas.  But the urban heat island correction to such a problem requires that an increasing temperature correction be subtracted from the record, not added to it.

So what is the reason for this positive addition to the surface temperature record?  Well, there is reason to believe it is simply to eliminate the cooling that broadly occurred between 1940 and 1980 when the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was increasing.  This was not good for the claim that man's use of fossil fuels was causing a catastrophic rise in surface temperatures, just as the present failure of the temperature to rise in the last 17 years is also an embarrassment to that hypothesis. 

Steven Goddard produces an e-mail from Tom Wigley to Phil Jones that points to a non-scientific reason for the adjustment reminiscent of a high school student fudging results in a laboratory report to get the expected answer from a botched experiment.

So why is this important?  For one thing, Tom Wigley was a member of the UCAR team.  This outfit describes itself on its website today as:

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research is a consortium of more than 100 member colleges and universities focused on research and training in the atmospheric and related Earth system sciences. Our members set directions and priorities for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which UCAR manages with sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. Through our community programs, UCAR provides innovative services in support of the community's education and research goals.

Phil Jones was the head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK, before his shenanigans revealed by ClimateGate cost him his job.  Phil Jones was a principal coordinator of the science that was incorporated into the first four IPCC reports backing the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming.  So, Tom Wigley of the UCAR climate research coordinating group for all government-funded climate research in the US was scheming with the head of the very important Climatic Research Unit in the UK to fraudulently produce more evidence for their pet theory, as they were being encouraged to do by their governments.  UCAR was and is essentially a propaganda unit charged with also keeping government-funded researchers in-line by setting "directions and priorities" in collusion with the National Science Foundation.

There is almost nothing in the government-managed record of temperatures that one can believe in any more.  The record is highly fudged and the fudgers have no idea themselves what string of changes they made to the data, whether as to how often, how much, or why.  But, those changes appear to systematically be motivated by attempts to prove the hypothesis that man's use of fossil fuels was somehow causing a catastrophic global warming.

NASA Alters Iceland Temperature Record to Produce Warming

Steven Goddard at Real Science has an interesting post that provides the changes by NASA in the temperature records for Reykjavik, Iceland.

Apparently, NASA is convinced that Icelanders misread their thermometers by as much as 2.4 C in 1940 and 1941 and subtracted that huge correction to those years.  From 1955 to 1963 NASA subtracted about 1.2 C from the temperature record.  Since 1993 they added to the temperatures.

One might think a correction to the temperature record for the purposes of gaining a better sense of the change in global temperatures generally would be appropriate.  This change would be a correction for urban heat island effects.  The correction that NASA made would be of the correct sense if the population of Reykjavik, Iceland had decreased greatly since the start of this record in 1901.  If the population had increased, then the correction should be to subtract from the measured temperature as the population increased.

Surprise!  The population of Reykjavik did not shrink greatly from 1901 until now!  No, it actually increased by a factor of 18.8.  Since 1940, the population increased by a factor of 3.1.  Throughout this time, the population of Reykjavik increased except for the loss of a few hundred people since 2008.  So, NASA did not make these corrections to correct for the urban heat island effect.

The net effect is to create the illusion of a rise in temperatures in recent years to comply with the catastrophic AGW agenda due to man's emissions of CO2.  This appears to be why the temperature corrections were made.  If not, it sure would be great to learn what the reason was.

California Cities Cool in Last Decade

Meteorologist Jan Null compared the temperature and precipitation records of the National Climatic Data Center for many California cities for the earlier period of 1971-2000 to the period from 1981-2010.  The later period generally was cooler, with increased precipitation.  The temperature records of rural areas commonly do not show the temperature increases commonly seen in cities due to the urban heat island effect.  When even the temperature of cities is going down on most of our West Coast, this is a dramatic event.  It must have been an especially unwelcome outcome for Jan Null, who is an ardent catastrophic man-made global warming booster.  The results of his study were published in the San Francisco newspaper The Chronicle on 6 July with a very nice graphic by Todd Trumbull.

Null claimed that man-made global warming caused the warming in Redding and Fresno and the warmth there caused cool air to be drawn in from the sea to cool the coastal cities.  Why they would have a cooling effect on Los Angeles and San Diego is surely unclear.  Indeed, warm temperatures in the Central Valley usually are caused by high pressure systems that actually cause winds along the coast to go out to sea and the warming of the coastal areas.  Null was apparently desperate to null out the use of his analysis of the data as a refutation of man-made global warming.

One also has to wonder why the data sets used have a 20-year period of overlap.  That 20-year overlap with only 10 years on the earlier end or on the later end, should cause any net cooling effect from 2001 to 2010 compared to the start period for the last cycle of warming claimed generally from 1971 to 1980 to be minimized.  Perhaps that was the point of the long overlap.

Given California's problems with insufficient water supply, the increased precipitation in most of the areas ought to be a positive thing, rather than a catastrophe.  I will not claim the drop in temperatures is a good thing, but it sure does take some wind out of the sails of the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists who are always using temperature increases, either real or due to urban heat island effects, as evidence that CO2 emissions are going to kill the planet.

Actually, if the increased precipitation is raising the humidity enough, it is possible that the lowered temperatures do not actually mean a reduction of heat energy.  This is because more humid air can hold a lot more energy at a given temperature than drier air.  But, the man-made global warming alarmists do not take note of this when they use any warming of air to claim that it was caused by man's CO2 emissions.

Recent Ocean Heat Content Trend Shows Lack of Heating

J. M. Lyman and colleagues earlier this year claimed the ocean heat content data of 1993 to 2008 showed a global warming trend of 0.63 +- 0.28 W/sq.m.  They allowed that the rise from 1993 to 2000 was followed by a flattening ocean temperature that started about 2001-2002.  Given a peak in land surface temperatures around 1998 and a subsequent flattening for a few years after that as solar irradiance and sunspot activity moved out of a warm cycle into what is looking more and more like a cooling cycle, it is to be expected that the ocean heat content would rise for a few years following the end of the solar irradiance increases.  As Roger Pielke Sr.has pointed out, the oceans hold 90% of the variable heat content of the Earth in the upper ocean water.  Thus, trends in the upper ocean temperatures and its heat content must be related to the solar radiance, though with a bit of lag and some averaging due to the huge heat capacity of the ocean.

With respect to longer term trends in the Earth's climate, the upper ocean temperatures are a much better measure than the flighty atmospheric temperatures on land, which are influenced much more by the time of day and the nearby human population.  We know the ground-based weather stations to have been badly biased upward by urban heat island effects (here, here, here, and here) and a long period of undocumented data manipulation (here and here and here).

R. S. Knox and D. H. Douglass of the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Rochester have an in press publication in the International Journal of Geosciences, which uses data from the global array of Argo floats to calculate the ocean heat content (OHC) of the upper oceans.  The Argo floats were deployed in the early 2000s and are less prone to the biases and errors of the expendable bathythermographs used to obtain earlier ocean data.  The data is show in the graph below:

The green line shows the average annual ocean surface temperature provided by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.  That has been trending downward since 2003, with most of the drop since 2005.  The Argo data from the surface to a depth of 700 meters is plotted in blue.  The red data points are the 12-month moving average of the blue line data.  The dashed red line is the linear fit to the 12-month moving average data.  The energy flux to compare to the Lyman result of 0.63 +- 0.28 W/sq. meter increase is -0.161 +- 0.040 W/sq. meter.

The result does not indicate the expected large rate of increase in OHC due to a warming planet if the increasing concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere were the primary driving force in our climate and it acted as the climate models have generally claimed it does.  Given the short span of time and the strong annual variations of the OHC, this result does not clearly rule out a warming effect of CO2 upon the Earth's temperature.  But, it does suggest that the cooling expected by many solar scientists due to decreased sunspot activity, may have started.  It argues that it is foolish to believe that the warming trend of the 1980s and 1990s was the early part of a catastrophe, which was caused by increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2.  It argues that we need to continue to carefully observe solar effects and the ocean heat content so that we can come to a real understanding of our climate and what causes longer term changes in it.

It also follows that forcing the world's peoples to do without energy or to pay skyrocketing costs for renewable energy or carbon sequestration on the basis of an ensuing catastrophe caused by man-made CO2 emissions is without justification.  It is terribly wrongheaded to use force to make people give up many of the comforts of their lives because some scientists and politicians have been claiming an unproved hypothesis is established fact.  Far from it, the strong global warming claim based on atmospheric CO2 has a trendline which indicates that it is not likely to make the transition from hypothesis to proven theory!

Some Examples of Serious AGW Problems Emphasized by the CRU E-mail Dump

The recent dump of e-mails, documents, and programs from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia by a probable whistle-blower has made the manufactured consensus and the problems of the science by the catastrophic AGW alarmists all the more apparent.  Here are a few nuggets:

Much attention has been given to Michael Mann’s (Pennsylvania State University) and Keith Briffa's (CRU) proxy temperature data hockey stick data sets. Briffa was conflicted in this whole process, noting he “[tried] hard to balance the needs of the IPCC with science, which were not always the same.  He felt “there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data.’”

Programmer Ian “Harry” Harris, in the Harry_Read_Me.txt file, commented about:

[The] hopeless state of their (CRU) data base. … No uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found. … I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case?Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. …
This whole project is SUCH A MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!
I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can’t get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the updateprog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections – to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?

Here is an e-mail from Tom Wigley, the former head of the CRU and now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, to Phil Jones, the recent head of the CRU in which he expresses concern about Keith Briffa's work:

Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:57:57 -0600
From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones Subject: Re: [geo] Re: CCNet: A Scientific Scandal Unfolds…
139.222.131.184
Phil,
It is distressing to read that American Stinker item. But Keith does seem to have got himself into a mess. As I pointed out in emails, Yamal is insignificant....
But, more generally, (even if it *is* irrelevant) how does Keith explain the McIntyre plot that compares Yamal-12 with Yamal-all? And how does he explain the apparent “selection” of the less well-replicated chronology rather that the later (better replicated) chronology?
Of course, I don’t know how often Yamal-12 has really been used in recent, post-1995, work. I suspect from what you say it is much less often that M&M [McIntyre and fellow sceptic Professor Ross McKitrick] say—but where did they get their information? I presume they went thru papers to see if Yamal was cited, a pretty foolproof method if you ask me.
Perhaps these things can be explained clearly and concisely—but I am not sure Keith is able to do this as he is too close to the issue and probably quite pissed of.
And the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato, one that affects both you and Keith (and Mann). Yes, there are reasons—but many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The
trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something, and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden.
I think Keith needs to be very, very careful in how he handles this. I’d be willing to check over anything he puts together.
Tom.


Wigley protested Michael Mann's sending a deceptive graph with a “fluke” result to back up Wigley’s contention that the recent cooling was still consistent with overall warming. He also claimed the IPCC and AGW scientists had made too many “dishonest presentations”.

On Oct 14, 2009, at 5:57 PM, Tom Wigley wrote:
Mike,
The Figure you sent is very deceptive. As an example, historical runs with PCM look as though they match observations—but the match is a fluke. PCM has no indirect aerosol forcing and a low climate sensitivity—compensating errors. In my (perhaps too harsh) view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC. This is why I still use results from MAGICC to compare with observed temperatures. At least here I can assess how sensitive matches are to sensitivity and forcing assumptions/uncertainties.
Tom.

Here is another matter discussed by Andrew Bolt:

The IPCC’s 2007 report made an allowance that drew heavily on a 1990 paper by Phil Jones that dismissed the UHI effect as largely trivial. That in turn drew heavily on a paper by Professor Wang Wei-Chyung of Albany, State University of New York, which presented data from China which both Wang and Jones claimed came from stations that had “few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times”, and so could be relied upon.

Mathematician Doug Keenan and others obtained the original Wang data and used it to track down the Chinese weather stations. They found that 49 of the 84 stations used actually had no records of station location, eight had inconsistent histories, 18 had been moved a considerable distance, and only seven were known not to have been relocated. One station had five different locations in 30 years as far as 41 km apart.

Wang seemed to have lied. His data was essentially worthless, and Jones’ (and the IPCC’s) claim that the Urban Heat Island effect was trivial now seemed unsupported by solid evidence.

These and many more documents have served to make it ever clearer that the catastrophic AGW hypothesis is mighty dubious.  The hockey stick data of Keith Briffa, the claim that the urban heat island effect is unimportant, and the reliability of the basic land surface temperature data sets are all key points undermined by these documents.

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.

Biasing the Surface Land Temperature Record with Big Cities

Willis Eschenbach has been doing some great digging into the UN IPCC AR4 surface land temperature record.  He notes that the UN IPCC AR4 says:

Additional warming occurs in cities and urban areas (often referred to as the urban heat island effect), but is confined in spatial extent, and its effects are allowed for both by excluding as many of the affected sites as possible from the global temperature data and by increasing the error range.

He checked into this:

To check this claim, I took the list of temperature stations used by CRU (which I had to use an FOI to get), and checked them against the GISS list. The GISS list categorizes stations as “Urban” or “Rural”. It also uses satellite photos to categorize the amount of light that shows at night, with big cities being brightest. It puts them into three categories, A, B, and C. C is the brightest.

It turns out that there are over 500 cities in the CRU database that the GISS database categorizes as “Urban C”, the brightest of cities. These include, among many others:

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND
BANGKOK METROPOLIS, THAILAND
BARCELONA, SPAIN
BEIJING, CHINA
BRASILIA, BRAZIL
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND
DHAKA, BANGLADESH
FLORENCE, ITALY
GLASGOW, UK
GUATEMALA CITY, GUATEMALA
HANNOVER, GERMANY
INCHON, KOREA
KHARTOUM, SUDAN
KYOTO, JAPAN
LISBON, PORTUGAL
LUXOR, EGYPT
MARRAKECH, MOROCCO
MOMBASA, KENYA
MOSKVA, RUSSIAN FEDERA
MOSUL, IRAQ
NAGASAKI, JAPAN
NAGOYA, JAPAN
NICE, FRANCE
OSAKA, JAPAN
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA
SAO PAULO, BRAZIL
SEOUL, KOREA
SHANGHAI, CHINA
SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS
TOKYO, JAPAN
VALENCIA, SPAIN
VOLGOGRAD, USSR

So the CRU is using Tokyo? Beijing? Seoul? Shanghai? Moscow? Their claim is entirely false. In other words, once again the good folk of the CRU are blowing smoke. I can understand why it took me a Freedom of Information request to get the station list.

It is utter nonsense to include data from weather stations in large, medium, or even small cities to produce a record of temperature which might address whether there are human effects of note on the global climate.  Indeed, if you want to bias the results in that direction, the best way to do it is to drop rural weather stations and leave a large number of city stations in your database of temperatures.  This has clearly been done in the U.S. and, according to the Institute of Economic Analysis in Moscow, in Russia.  This list makes it very clear that such warming as has not been added simply by changing recent measurements upward and dropping the measurements of earlier decades, has been strongly biased in an upward direction by using data from many cities and dropping many rural stations.  The only useful data is from rural stations in actual fact.  That this is occurring is a very blatant scientific fraud.

David Evans - No smoking hot spot

Dr. David Evans, a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, has changed his mind on the hypothesis that man-made production of CO2 is the cause of recent global warming. He tells us why in this commentary, "No smoking hot spot."

He says, "since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, 'When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?'"

The reasons for his change of mind:

• "The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it." The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10 km altitude in the atmosphere over the tropics. In 2007, the evidence was conclusive that no such hot spot exists, though hundreds of measurements have been made looking for it.
• There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that carbon dioxide emissions cause significant global warming.
• The satellites that measure the world's temperature say warming ended in 2001. The temperature has since dropped, so that it has returned to that of 1980. Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the urban heat island effect and cannot be trusted. Only the satellite data is trustworthy and it only goes back to 1979.
• "The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect."

He notes that the last point was known in 2003, two years before Al Gore made his movie and claimed that ice cores showed that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused the prior instances of historical global warming. He and the press who did not call him on this were simply dishonest.

Evans says that the debate on global warming has "consisted of a simple sleigh of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions. In the minds of the audience, the evidence that global warming has occurred becomes conflated with the alleged cause, and the audience hasn't noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved. If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don't you think we would have heard all about it ad nauseam by now? The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory."

I would add to this that the computer models have had a consistent record of predicting larger temperature increases than have actually occurred, even prior to the totally unexplainable recent decrease in temperatures. That is, unexplainable in terms of the carbon emissions computer models. They are more understandable in terms of such things as variations in the solar radiation reaching Earth and other natural phenomena. Indeed, there is a huge hubris at work when people make overblown predictions of man-made global warming being dominant over natural causes when we look at the record of the Earth's temperature over the last 600 million years. In that record, the present temperatures are very unusually low and the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are also very low. It is foolish to put much truck in these computer models which are totally unable to predict the past in accordance with the known record.

It is shameful that so many scientists are unable to reason this out. Of course many of them are on university campuses where science is often held hostage to socialism and anti-capitalist causes. When campus politics comes to play a role, objectivity vanishes. Some others work for government agencies, which are commonly eager to expand their powers in a war against some threat or other, which they are often happy to exaggerate or manufacture.