NOAA Conducts Large-Scale Experiment And Proves Global Warming Skeptics Correct

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? The bottom image (Image #3) tells that story - when compared to measurements from the old, inaccurate, non-pristine network, temperature "warming" in the U.S. is being overstated anywhere from +0.5°C on average, up to almost +4.0°C (+0.9°F to +7.2°F) in some locations during the summer months.

To clarify, this range of overstatement depends on the given new and old stations being compared. However, when the new network versus old network results are examined in total, for the recent summer heat wave in the U.S., the old stations were reporting bogus warming during July that amounted to some +2.1°F higher than the actual temperatures.

What does this mean? Within the climate science realm, the old climate/weather station system had long been considered the best and most complete measurement network in the world. But when pitted against a brand new climate measurement system that has the best qualities that science can provide, we find that the traditional U.S. methodology is significantly overstating the "global warming" phenomenon. This means that if other countries replaced their own low quality network with NOAA's greatest and latest technology, with the best location site standards applied, we would discover that world-wide temperature increases have been wildly overstated also.

Conclusions: A large-scale NOAA experiment has proven that global warming skeptics were correct: temperature warming in the U.S. has been significantly overstated in recent decades. This NOAA experiment should be expanded to other continents and countries since it is now obvious that the combined older technology and substandard weather station sites have well overstated the global warming phenomenon. Before any further dollars are spent on climate change adaptation and/or mitigation, the world needs to upgrade their global weather/climate reporting network to the USCRN standard so that policymakers have correct temperature change mesurements to base their decisions on.

Modern, regional, historical and fabricating-fake temperature charts.

Comments

[Richard Allison]

Has anyone ever considered external factors such as solar radiation anomomilies? The sun is in an active solar period and in fact I have read articles that temperatures on Mars and other planets are experiencing higher temps? I think the issue is too complicated for scientists that are receiving money for studies from politicians to support political issues. Climate change is a means to tax and generate money for a global government. It is all about money.. I reject the whole THEORY of man made global warming.

[Neil Ferguson]

Dear Editor,
Thank you very much for your response.
First, Doh. I meant "lower" not "higher", as implied by the rest of the first paragraph. That's my story, anyway.
Second, I am supposing that instrument and measurement methodology errors (e.g. time of day inconsistencies) revealed by USCRN will call for adjustments to all historical raw temperature measurements that are fairly constant over the past 150 years, allowing for variations in equipment and similar technical distinctions. To over-simplify, I am supposing that USCRN justifies going through all historical records and subtracting a more or less constant X degrees from each measurement. If my supposition is true, aren't we still left with the same magnitude and pattern of warming claimed by warmists?
Third, when I say "warmists have dismissed the issue", I am not trying to make a rhetorical argument. As I understand the state of the controversy, the Watts Surface Station Project found that Yes, there's a big UHI effect in populated areas, but No, it's not statistically important with respect to the average global temperature. (Warmists eagerly agree with the second clause, anyhow.) I hope very much I don't have that conclusion right. I hope that Watts has found that UHI explains most of the warming. But if I do have it right, does even the larger UHI implied by USCRN make a difference?
Fourth, yeah, warmist claims of "hottest", "record setting" are a crock. Your points are germane to USCRN, I guess, if tangential to my question.
Fifth, I am perfectly willing to stipulate that the warmists have trashed the historical record. Unless my understanding of UHI effects is wrong, I don't see how USCRN helps the skeptics to refute warmist claims for the historical record.
With greatest respect,
Neil Ferguson

[C3 editor]

First, the absolute temperatures as measured by the new technology and 'pristine' sites are lower than ones being recorded by the older stations, not "higher."

Second, a linear trend is not an accurate projection for the future. The slope (rate of change) is changing constantly. For example, over the last 15 years the NCDC has the rate of change of U.S. temperatures at a minus -1.7 degrees F per century through July 2012 (surprise!). However, for the 15 year period ending July 1934, the rate of change was plus +8.6 degrees F per century (bigger surprise!). This article was not about rate of change, but if it was, the alarmists manage to hoist themselves on their own petard with it.

Third, "warmists have dismissed the issue" is a rhetorical argument without merit. They have no empirical evidence to refute the major points of skeptics, thus the warmists simply "dismiss" an argument. Or, they statistically torture the data to get a desired result, and more often than not, the tortured techniques used can't stand up to the scrutiny of experts.

Fourth, this large scale NOAA experiment confirms what skeptics have stated before: reported temperatures are significantly contaminated by an UHI effect and other human influences, which completely mocks any warmist claim that a given month, year or decade was the "warmest" or "record setting."

Fifth, this article does not even address the U.S. temperature dataset manipulation admitted to by NOAA that has consistently lowered temperatures prior to 1950 and raised those post 1950. This temperature fabrication not only the impacts the 'rate of change' argument made by warmists, but also makes it a lot easier to create those infamous "warmest" period claims that alarmists always fall back on and are so enamored with.

The policymakers and the public would all benefit if the warmists dropped their lame attempts at defending a very weak AGW hypothesis and instead, start arguing for monies to be spent to better measure other regions of the world using the same technology and standards that NOAA used for USCRN. Of course, the warmists won't argue for this because they know the accurate empirical evidence produced from such a world-wide system is highly likely to destroy the catastrophic global warming hysteria once and for all.

'C3'

[C3 editor]

When you consider all the different ways humans can influence temperature, it is likely "measurable" but not large. And even though it may be measurable it is probably not significant in the scheme of the long-term climate.

With that said, correct attribution of the human component of global temperatures appears to be beyond science at this point.

[Scott M.]

You ask "If every temperature estimate for the past 150 years is 1 deg warmer than the actual temperature, that doesn't change the rate of warming over that period." If it were true, but the temps AREN'T 1 deg linearly higher over the past 150 years. Only in recent years have the legacy reporting stations been including this gradual error - due in part to the growing civilization around their locations. So, the erroneous "rate" of warming" hasn't been continuous, but instead, rising.

[Neil Ferguson]

Could someone help me out here? It isn't obvious to me that the information in the article supports its conclusion. It shows that the new (USCRN) temperature level is higher than the older (USHCN) figures. But that isn't the fundamental climate issue. The issue is rate of warming. If every temperature estimate for the past 150 years is 1 deg warmer than the actual temperature, that doesn't change the rate of warming over that period.
Assuming the higher UHI impact shown is correct, one might infer that current theory hasn't adequately adjusted for UHI, so exaggerates apparent warming. But that issue has already been raised by skeptics, and warmists have dismissed the issue by explaining that UHI is insignificant because of the population density distribution of USHCN stations. I (total non-scientist) have not seen where this dismissal has been refuted by skeptics. And wasn't it the conclusion of the Andrew Watts Surface Station Project?
Thanks,
Neil Ferguson

[Mushroomgeoerge]

If humans had a "measurable" impact on global temperatures we would have measured it. It would be a matter of knowledge not belief. I hope you meant to say humans have a theoretical impact on global temperatures that is too small to measure.