C3 Headlines:
Most global warming skeptics believe that humans have some measurable impact on global temperatures and the climate, but that natural climate forces, over longer periods, will overwhelm the human influence…in addition, skeptics believe that the human influence will not result in the hysterical catastrophic climate disasters presented by doomsday pundits…
(click image to enlarge, image source of one, two, three)
…and finally, global warming skeptics believe, for a multitude of reasons, human errors/mistakes/failings have caused late 20th century global warming to be significantly overstated.
This article addresses this last point. What if the climate experts conducted an actual experiment that would prove whether the global warming skeptics were right or wrong about world-wide warming being overstated?
Well, NOAA has actually conducted said experiment by building their U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), which precisely, and automatically, measures temperature and weather conditions across the U.S. The USCRN effort is based on the concept that the best way to measure the impact of greenhouse gases on global temperatures is to place state-of-the-art climate stations in pristine rural areas that are little impacted by people, buildings, vehicles, equipment, asphalt and etc.
An example of one of NOAA’s pristine climate measurement stations is the top image (Image #1). And the middle image depicts the location of each pristine station – there are currently 114 of them, and clearly they are well dispersed providing good U.S. coverage.
By carefully planning and maintaining these pristine stations and by using the best technology available, this large-scale experiment eliminates the following problems with the older weather measurement network:
- There are no observer or transcription errors to correct.
- There is no time of observation bias, nor need for correction of it.
- There is no broad scale missing data, requiring filling in data from potentially bad surrounding stations. (FILNET)
- There are no needs for bias adjustments for equipment types since all equipment is identical.
- There are no need for urbanization adjustments, since all stations are rural and well sited.
- There are no regular sensor errors due to air aspiration and triple redundant lab grade sensors. Any errors detected in one sensor are identified and managed by two others, ensuring quality data.
- Due to the near perfect geospatial distribution of stations in the USA, there isn’t a need for gridding to get a national average temperature.
So, what has this NOAA experiment found?
It’s wonderful news.
Even a kid doing a science faire project would have been embarrassed by some of those old temperature data collector stations.
I mean some were
on concrete,
on asphalt,
on cement,
on roofs,
too close to a BBQ,
too close to cars,
too close to heating ducting,
too close to air conditioner equipment,
and so on.
The sad thing is that it took so long to ”prove scientifically” that the old stations sucked.
I think that this is one of the issues that we have been telling the left for years. Anthony Watts was a pioneer in this area. http://wattsupwiththat.com/ Four degrees C of error is quite a lot when the warmers believe that 3 degrees C will melt the icecaps and flood Florida and Manhatten. The conclusions that maybe we should find an accurate process for measuring the world temperature before we start trying to combat an enemy that may not even exist. Obama has spent much more on the war against a maybe warming then Bush spent on Iraq and Afghanistan.
I have followed the “climate change” issue for about 10 years (mostly at sites like WUWT and doing a lot of research on my own). I do not believe errors in the reported records amount too very much in terms of any major increase or decrease in long term trends. I do believe though that before we waste trillions of dollars pretending in the delusion that we could do anything to make a major change in the climate, we should have at least an honest discussion about the quality of the data. After all, we are haggling over 10ths of a degree !!
The largest issue should be the blatant fraud committed by GISS with their adjustments to the data to create a false trend.