U.S. Surface Station Network Is Fatally Flawed, Heartland Report Shows by H. Sterling Burnett
W
ay back when climate change was still called global warming, the whole thing was a bit more honest. The basic underlying cause of how catastrophic climate change is supposed to be occurring is greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere, trapping heat, warming the Earth, and driving myriad other changes such as worsening weather events. The problem for that narrative is that the Earth has not been warming to the degree (pun fully intended) that climate models have consistently projected over the years it would. No catastrophic warming, no catastrophic climate change. If climate models
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are wrong about the most basic projection they were created to make, there is no reason to take any of their other projections seriously. Worse news for climate alarmists— though not for normal people with other things to worry about—is that even the warming that has been recorded is a result of bias, not reality, with reported average temperatures being higher and trending steeper than if the system used accurate measurements. Proof of this has been published in a new report by The Heartland Institute: Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Surface Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed. This report is an update of a 2009 study by meteorologist Anthony Watts, a Heartland senior fellow: Is The U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? Spoiler alert: it wasn’t then, and it isn’t now. The 2009 study found approximately 89 percent of the stations used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to calculate average U.S. temperatures failed to meet the National Weather Service’s (NWS) siting standards, which stipulate stations must be 30 meters (100
feet) or more away from any artificial or radiating reflecting heat source. That was disgracefully poor performance. The new, updated report says the situation is now worse. The 2009 report received widespread media attention, which sparked multiple agency audits and Inspector General investigations. Several scientific studies confirmed Watts’ results, all the while trying to downplay their importance. As one Inspector General report stated, “NOAA acknowledges that there are problems with the [United States Historical Climatology Network] data due to biases introduced by such means as undocumented site relocation, poor siting, or instrument changes.” NOAA and the NWS took a variety of actions in the aftermath of the 2009 report, perhaps in response to it. Some were positive; others appear intended to bolster the claims of dangerously rising temperatures on which Watts’s study cast doubt. On the positive side, the agencies closed some of the worst temperature stations, in particular those held out for specific ridicule in Watts’ 2009 report. These include stations in Marysville, California; at the Uni-
