Investor's Business Daily, June 22nd, 2007
Climate Change: The problem with warming predictions may lie in how we measure the present. Can we say that 2006 was the warmest year ever when the temperature is being measured mere feet from air conditioning exhaust?
We are all familiar with the scenario. Junior wants to stay home from school so he holds a match under a thermometer and then runs to mom to say he has a fever. We don't think it's deliberate, but something similar may be happening with our weather-monitoring methodology.
In January, the folks at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration trumpeted the "fact" that 2006 was the warmest year ever recorded in the continental United States. This was based on daily temperature data gathered by NOAA's National Climactic Data Center and the 1,221 or so weather observation stations it monitors around the country.
Where these stations are and what is in the vicinity can make a difference. NOAA admits that stations have been moved and modernized as technology and the locales change. They provide input to the computer climate models that warming alarmists use to predict the day after tomorrow.
Bill Steigerwald of FrontPageMagazine.com reports on an enterprising former TV meteorologist in Chico, Calif., Anthony Watts, who wondered about the accuracy and reliability of these stations and a system that has been in use since the early 1900s.
So Watts and a few volunteers decided to check a few of them out, about 40 so far. They found one station in Forest Grove, Ore., that stands just 10 feet from an air conditioning exhaust vent. Another station in Roseburg, Ore., is on a rooftop near an AC unit. In Tahoe, Calif., one is near a drum where trash is burned.
Watts has set up a Web site (www.surfacestations.org) to chronicle and document his group's findings. Watts observes: "I believe we will be able to demonstrate that some of the global warming increase is not from CO2 but from localized changes in the temperature-measurement environment."
America is a lot more urbanized than it used to be. Lots of concrete and asphalt have been poured. Big cities full of tall buildings have gotten bigger and what greenies call urban sprawl continues. These cities are natural "heat islands" that can not only affect the weather but how we measure it. And if some urban dweller wants to put an A/C unit next to a station that records temperature on his property, what's to stop him or her?
In case you missed the headline in the New York Times, NOAA went back and updated its 2006 report based on "revised statistics." This is not unusual. NOAA does try to do its own station-checking to reflect changes in the station environments.
The result was that 2006 was determined to be the second-warmest year "on record."
The year 1998 still holds the honor. At an annual average temperature of 59.4 degrees Fahrenheit it was actually some 0.08 degrees cooler.
Warnings of imminent climate doom are based on computer models that are often based on agreed-upon assumptions and fed a relatively small portion of the immense number of variables that affect weather and climate. One of those variables is temperature, and it needs to be measured accurately.
Otherwise, as the computer geeks say: garbage in, garbage out.
