Global Warming Hysteria: Relying on Unreliable Data

USDA Weather Station and technician Dan Palic (Credit: Scott Bauer)

If we’re going to make drastic policy changes such as President Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme which is likely to raise Americans’ electric bills by 40% and kill thousands of jobs, we should be darn sure we’re doing it for a darn good reason–something that requires darn reliable data.

Aside from the fact that we’ve seen drastic temperature fluctuations going back thousands of years, and aside from the fact that planetary warming is occurring on other planets such as Mars and Jupiter where there are no SUVs or power plants, how reliable is our temperature data?  You might be surprised.

Anthony Watts and about 650 volunteers have been checking the more than 1,200 monitoring stations around the United States and have made some interesting discoveries.

According to Watts’ website Watts Up With That, temperature readings at the vast majority of the sites they’ve surveyed (more than 70% of the total) are off by several degrees.

What could account for these discrepancies?

Well, a number of monitoring stations have been in place for decades.  When they first began collecting data, they were in undeveloped areas. Over the years, however, development has encroached, bringing with it lots of concrete and asphalt which soaks up heat from the sun.

Consider also the site in Marysville, California where a monitoring station is just a few feet from a large air conditioning vent which spews out lots of hot air.  There is also plenty of the aforementioned concrete and asphalt around to heat things up, too.

Notice also that in one experiment, different readings were obtained based on the type of paint used on the monitoring station, and all temps varied considerably from the air temperature.

Data from satellites and surface monitoring stations sometimes disagrees significantly, as well.

Of course, even if temperatures on Earth have indeed climbed in recent decades, data now indicates temps have leveled off.

And the cause of any warming remains the key question.

Given that we have undoubtedly seen warmer periods far into earth’s history, and that warming has also been occurring on planets where there are no capitalists to mess things up, the most rational answer has to be “natural causes.”

But then, socialists and believers in the religion of anthropogenic global warming have never let things like science and common sense get in the way of their agenda to cripple the economy of the West.

HT to the American Thinker.

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