U.S. Climate Data Compromised by Sensors' Proximity to Heat Sources, Critics Say
On
6:55 PM
0
comments
By Joseph Abrams-Foxnews.com
A critical cog in the machinery that drives the theory of global warming is a small white box not too far from where you live. Inside the box sits a thermometer that tracks the local temperature, which in turn becomes part of a data trail for the monitoring of climate change on Earth.
But there's a problem: Nearly every single weather station the U.S. government uses to measure the country's surface temperature may be compromised. Sensors that are supposed to be in empty clearings are instead exposed to crackling electronics and other unlikely sources of heat, from exhaust pipes and trash-burning barrels to chimneys and human graves.
The National Climate Data Center (NCDC) uses this massive network of sensors to determine daily highs and lows at the 1,219 weather stations in its Historical Climatology Network (HCN). The network has existed since 1892, but only in the last decade has it come under intense scrutiny to determine whether the figures it measures can be trusted.
For the past three years, a group of zealous laymen has visited and photographed nearly every one of the weather stations to determine whether they have been placed properly. And what they found is a stunning disregard for the government's own rules: 90 percent of the sensors are too close to potential sources of heat to pass muster, including some very odd sources indeed:
• A sensor in Redding, Calif., is housed in a box that also contains a halogen light bulb, which could emit warmth directly onto the gauge.
• A sensor in Hanksville, Utah, sits directly atop a gravestone, which is not only macabre but also soaks up the sun's heat and radiates it back to the thermometer at night.
• A sensor in Marysville, Calif., sits in a parking lot at a fire station right next to an air conditioner exhaust, a cell phone tower and a barbecue grill.
• A sensor in Tahoe City, Calif., sits near a paved tennis court and is right next to a "burn barrel" that incinerates garbage.
• A sensor in Hopkinsville, Ky., is sheltered from the wind by an adjoining house and sits above an asphalt driveway.
• Dozens of sensors are located at airports and sewage treatment plants, which produce "heat islands" from their sprawling seas of asphalt and heavy emissions.
"So far we've surveyed 1,062 of them," said Anthony Watts, a meteorologist who began the tracking effort in 2007. "We found that 90 percent of them don't meet [the government's] old, simple rule called the '100-foot rule' for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence. Ninety percent of them failed that, and we've got documentation."
Watts, who has posted pictures of the sensors on his Web site, SurfaceStations.org, says he believes that the location of the sensors renders their recorded temperatures inaccurate, which in turn brings some of the data behind global warming theory into question.
"It's asinine to think that this wouldn't have some kind of an effect," Watts told FoxNews.com.
But climate scientists who analyze the data say that they are able to account and adjust for the faulty locations by comparing warming trends they spot at bad sites to trends they see at good ones.
"If you use only the sites that currently have good siting versus those that have not-so-good siting, when you look at the adjusted data basically you get the same trend," said Jay Lawrimore, chief of the climate monitoring branch at NCDC.
Lawrimore admitted that Watts' volunteers had discovered real problems with sensor siting, but he said that even when those sites' heat readings were adjusted down, they still showed a steady overall rise in temperatures.
"The ultimate conclusion, the bottom line is that there really isn't evidence that the trends have a bias based on the current siting," he said.
And surface station data is only a small subset of information confirming the warming of the climate, Lawrimore said.
Changes in air temperature, water temperature, glacier melt, plant flowering, tree growth and species migration, among many others, show the same worldwide trend -- a 0.7 degree Celsius jump (1.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past century.
"There's a certain amount of uncertainty in the calculation of trends, but not to the extent that we don't know the climate is warming," he said.
Watts readily agrees that temperatures are on the rise worldwide, but he believes the magnitude of the increase is in question, and he says his research puts the 1.2-degree global figure in doubt.
But a team of three climatologists has completed a study of Watts' data on HCN siting and found the warming trend to be confirmed.
In fact, the three NCDC scientists, Matthew Menne, Claude Williams and Michael Palecki, say they found that instrument updates in the 1980s have created a cooling bias, and that adjusted and cleaned up data from even the bad sites is "extremely well aligned" with measurements from instruments that meet the "highest standards for climate monitoring."
"We find no evidence that the [contiguous U.S.] temperature trends are inflated due to poor station siting," reads the study, which is set to be published in a forthcoming volume of the "Journal of Geophysics Research -- Atmospheres."
"It's all objective analysis based on statistics," said Matthew Menne, the lead author of the study.
But Menne's study was conducted using information on only 43 percent of the weather stations. Watts, who has now compiled information on 80 percent of the stations and cleaned up his old information, contends that a more complete data set would furnish different results, and he plans to conduct a study of his own under the aegis of Roger Pielke Sr., a research scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
A better test of the network's data is on the horizon. In the past eight years, the NOAA has established a hi-tech system that sends information via satellite and abides by all of its own rules for siting. Each sensor is ideally placed in open areas far from other structures, a fact that pleases both government scientists and longstanding critics like Watts.
"I'm convinced that the new system, the Climate Reference Network, will provide a reasonably accurate set of readings," Watts said.
But data has only begun to be collected from CRN, a regional network of just 114 climate sensors that went fully online in 2008. It will take at least a decade, and as many as 30 years, until the information it collects becomes statistically significant.
In the meantime, and for many years past, the challenged data from NCDC has been providing information for a number of top climate research centers, including the U.N.'s International Panel on Climate Change, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the Hadley Climate Research Unit, headed until recently by Phil Jones, who resigned in the wake of the climate-gate scandal.
With mounting pressure on climate research facilities, scientists at the NCDC hope that their data won't be discounted because of the troubling images Watts has compiled.
"These photos show a current snapshot of these stations," said Menne. "We wouldn't want to dismiss 100 years of climate records based on a photograph from the year 2009."
By Adam Baldwin from BigHollywood.Breitbart.com
‘Racist!’, the political epithet, has rapidly lost credibility and political sting recently thanks to clumsy overuse by grievance-mongering thugs. The slur is a tactical viewpoint discrimination launched as a means to stifle intellectual diversity, rational discussion, and to shame people that diverge from race-hustling orthodoxy.
Tragically, such rhetorical abuse damages the appropriate use of the term – and leaves actual victims of “traditional” racism with a neutered descriptor that is quickly beginning to make the accuser sound like a whining name-caller. The sad irony is that abusers harm the very people they claim to be defending, most often for selfish political and financial profit.
Of course, follow the money…
Thomas Sowell:
Being a race hustler is a very lucrative business for people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. But such people can extort money and power from white business and political leaders precisely because it is easier to pay off a relative handful of noise makers than to be bothered fighting them. But tens of millions of blacks cannot duplicate what a small band of extortionists do.
Chasing a will o’ the wisp like reparations cannot produce what blacks most want — respect, including the self-respect that comes ultimately from one’s own achievements. This is something that whites could not give blacks if they wanted to.
That fading race-business model is likely depressing its intolerant participants’ financial outlook.
Time-out to play Spot the ‘Racists!’ (*NSFW*): Click the following link to the video...
A true classic, no?
Moral-crusaders on self-congratulatory, highly profitable missions exploit and perpetuate the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’. They are now desperate to keep their minority mascots in political servitude to one political party’s destructive ideology, i.e., dependence.
Ironically, Candidate Obama’s denunciation and public divorce from his long-time racist pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, played a pivotal role in accelerating the loss of race-hustler credibility in the current American zeitgeist; this cultural good fortune – secured for now by new/alternative media success — is likely to continue its progressive course into the foreseeable future.
Addressing his former pastor’s failures and “mistake” in his famous March, 2008 campaign ‘Race Speech,’ President Obama characterized our nation’s “racial divisions” as being in a “stalemate.” He asserted a firm conviction “rooted in [his] faith in God and [his] faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds.”
Later, elected president, Mr. Obama acknowledged his careless rush to judgment – which some deemed as reflexive reverse racism — that the Cambridge, MA Police “acted stupidly.” The president manned up and provided leadership at a healing “Beer Summit.” Ben Franklin, no stranger to beer, would’ve likely approved this gesture.
Rhetorically speaking, thank God that from now on when thought-terminating clichés such as “racist!,” “sexist!,” “bigot!,” “xenophobe!,” “homophobe!,” “hypocrite!,” “chicken-hawk!,” “Uncle Tom!,” “white supremacist!” etc. are hastily concocted (Max Blumenthal call your office), Americans are no longer intimidated by these divisive, intellectually-stifling smears.
Fearless rhetorical engagement in the modern cultural/political arena of ideas is a good and necessary component of our vigorous and successful Republic.
With principled firmness, a solid rejoinder to race-hustler-ridiculousness: “What hard evidence do you have other than clumsy guilt-by-association character assassination, and/or sins-of-the-father attacks and innuendo?”
Too often Modern Liberal arguments amount to nothing more than self-anointed moral rulings that certain people don’t at all have standing on various issues, especially race. These rulings are never ideologically neutral but, rather, are the notorious political weaponry of Saul Alinsky.
Once exclusively reserved for very effective use against unarmed conservatives, Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” is now self-defeating his radical ideological progeny. Now those are ‘chickens come home to roost’ that can benefit America!
Ridicule is, according to Alinsky, man’s most potent weapon.
Highly effective also is Andrew Breitbart’s approach of keeping the pressure on by freezing the target and making them live up to their own book of rules:
It’s time to hit back at these people — that these people keep calling you a racist… Instead of slinking into the corner and crying or saying ‘I don’t like that,’ you walk straight towards them and confront them; and they’re bullies, they’re just bullies and bullies crumble when you hit them back.
Unity is overrated… Saddle up. Let’s Roll!
Behar and Maher laugh about Cheney's Heart Attack: Like a Field Trip, No Class!
On
8:37 PM
0
comments
How much longer must these people have their own shows?
by Steven Crowder
The era of Reagan is over.
No, I don’t say that in the same way that RINO’s say it in an attempt to move towards the center and line their Brooks Brothers’ pockets. I say it in that the political landscape today has changed drastically and we need to do more than look to one transcendent figure as the leader of the conservative movement. Future generations will be won on the cultural front, and never through “politics.” Politicians are boring, plus they smell funny.
Say what you want about leftists; Sure they act a little crazy, wear pointy shoes and spit when they talk, but they are incredibly effective with planting cultural seeds. Avatar, plants a seed. Family Guy, plants a seed. SNL plants a seed. All of Comedy Central plants seeds. On the flip side, the sad fact of the matter is that conservatives have planted little to nothing in the cultural landscape.
Listen, you will never win the young masses through politics or a politician. The only way to win them over is through taking an active role in the culture. This is displayed by the fact that anytime a conservative steps foot into that arena leftists go insane (a kind of “Paula Abdul’s not taking her meds again” insane). One needs look no further than CPAC. The heavy-hitters weren’t the GOP politicians, but people like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Andrew Breitbart. Notice how agitated the mainstream media has become. Lefties are hoping that we’ve given up on Hollywood and mass media as a whole.
See, conservatives don’t flick the jab, which is why in the 15th round (election time) we find ourselves down on the scorecard and try to crank out a haymaker by finding some supernatural Reagan-like savior in a Sarah Palin or Scott Brown. The problem is that conservatives are fighting like Max Baer when we should be fighting like Cassius Clay.
Ronald Reagan worked in a generation brought up with traditional principles able to observe conservatism at work. Having also observed liberalism at work first-hand, and through critical thinking they decided to overwhelmingly revert back to conservatism.
The problem is that not only has this generation never seen TRUE conservatism at work, but they’ve been raised in a world of situational ethics. When you’ve been weaned on the teat of subjective morality, logic begins to play a smaller and smaller role as facts become subjective. Since we haven’t been planting the necessary cultural seeds with a younger generation, we can’t expect them to follow the logical path of conservatism.
Folks don’t expect politicians to ever step up to this plate either. The D.C. crowd often considers it “beneath them” to address mass media because in doing so they acknowledge that they watch it. After all, we all know that they don’t partake in such indulgences.
Case in Point; Barack Obama. Barack Obama the politician was never elected. Barack Obama the celebrity, on the other hand, was ushered in successfully by the Hollywood elite. It was never the Washington machine that made Obama merchandise the “it” fashion item of the season, but people like The Black-Eyed Peas, Scarlett Johanssen, P. Diddy, GreenDay, Steven Spielberg, Tina Fey, Seth McFarlane… Well I think you get the point.
My question to you is: if offered the power of Hollywood/the entertainment industry or Washington D.C. which would you choose?
I think that if you choose Washington you should seriously consider a CAT scan.
Should you decide to get one, I hear Sean Penn knows a guy.
They were so noble when they were out of power, Such dramatic, poetic language against the nuclear option, were is that passion now?
In an alarming finding, the Rasmussen Report found only 21% of Americans believe the Democrat-controlled U.S. government has the consent of the governed. Amazingly, this view is held by only 32% of Democrats.
Spurred by the unjust Wall Street Bailout, this crisis of consent is exacerbated by an Obama Administration and its Democratic Congress’ insistence on ramming through a government-run health care scheme in defiance of the sovereign American people’s emphatic opposition.
Now, having already pre-determined its outcome, the Obama Administration will hold a health care summit. The summit’s goal is to persuade the public that the Republican minority is “forcing” the Democrats’ heavy-handed tactics to foist this abominable bill upon Americans.
The truth is otherwise: it is the public and centrist Democrats who have to date stopped this radical proposal, which will raise the cost and lower the quality of Americans’ health care.
Consequently, with due respect for the President and ultimate respect for the American people, the Republican leadership has no choice. It must NOT accept the administration’s disingenuous summit invitation to “negotiate.”
To accept would abet a deceit upon the people; and violate the principle that transparency in government exists to reveal the truth and promote the public’s confidence in their representative institutions, not to foster misperceptions and subvert the public’s confidence in their representative institutions.
Fortunately, a solution exists: an election.
As in other times of great national debate, Democrats must let the competing views of health care – government-run, bureaucrat-centered medicine versus free-market, patient- centered wellness – be submitted to the American people for their sovereign consideration and determination this November.
Nothing could do more to promote Americans’ health care; and restore the public’s confidence they are being governed with their consent
So Red Eye fan Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, emailed me this weekend to tell me about a paper he wrote, due out today in the scientific journal Social PsychologyQuarterly.
It’s entitled “Why liberals and atheists are more intelligent.”
Already I hate it.
See, according to Satoshi, humans are “evolutionarily designed to be conservative and religious, and it is unnatural for them to be liberal and atheists.” But he found that smarter people are more likely to go against their evolutionary design and become liberals and atheists. That kind of rebelliousness doesn’t show up in the rest of us dumb folk, apparently.
A conservative himself, Satoshi says he doesn’t like these findings, but as a scientist he has to publish them. Good for him. Of course, the findings will be trumpeted far and wide by the left – just as it would have been by the right – if the results were different.
Which is poo-hicky. I can safely say that I am smarter than most lefties – so smart, in fact, that I can use words like “poo-hicky” and get away with it.
And here’s why. Satoshi’s is really suggesting that smart people are more likely to experiment, take risks and question the status quo. This makes sense. But this link between intelligence and rebellion is only temporary.
It happens that I was once a pimply-faced liberal, a perfectly normal state of rebellion for a typical attention-seeking teenager. But, after awhile, I started rejecting the easy romance of leftism, as hard reality started hitting me in the face. So,while it takes brains to question the natural state of things, you need even more brains to later question the questioning. Smart people question their parents, but then smarter people realize that after a brief intellectual vacation, their parents were right all along (unless mom or dad is a Baldwin).
Bottom line: braininess isn’t reflected in rebellion against common sense. Instead, it’s rebellion against rebellion that is the proof of highest intelligence of all.That – and an acceptance that unicorns rule and griffins suck.
And if you disagree with me, you’re probably a racist leprechaun who eats babies.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Cartoon
Posts
