Climate Alarmists Getting Colder

Climategate confirmed that the surface temperature records have been manipulated to "prove" global warming -- as much as 85 percent of the increase appears via adjustments.

Doubtful? Look to the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA, along with NASA, claims the world and nation are warmer:


source: NOAA's National Climate Data Center


Yet, NOAA's chart demonstrates the U.S. is no warmer today than in 1950 or 1930, exactly parallel to what Phil Jones admitted for global temps. And even that's dubious, given NOAA's conceded data changes:


source: NOAA's National Climate Data Center


Further confirmation comes from retired NASA scientist and physics Ph.D. Edward Long, in a new paper titled "Contiguous U. S. Temperature Trends Using NCDC Raw and Adjusted Data for One-Per-State Rural/Urban." Long began by agreeing that siting issues have rendered data from urban measurement stations utterly unreliable. That reflects a localized "urban heat-island effect" driven by increased population and pavement, not carbon-caused global warming. So Long wondered whether claims the U.S. had warmed stem from data adjustments that "forced the rural value to look more like that of the urban."

Simply put, the answer is yes. Here's adjusted U.S. temperature data from a sample of rural and urban stations:


source: Long, page 12

By comparison, here's the raw data from those same stations:


source: Long, page 10

As Long concludes:

The raw data provides 0.13 and 0.79 ^oC/century temperature increase for the rural and urban environments. The adjusted data provides 0.64 and 0.77 ^oC/century respectively. The rates for the raw data appear to correspond to the historical change of rural and urban U.S. populations and indicate warming is due to urban warming. Comparison of the adjusted data for the rural set to that of the raw data shows a systematic treatment that causes the rural adjusted set’s temperature rate of increase to be 5-fold more than that of the raw data. The adjusted urban data set’s and raw urban data set’s rates of temperature increase are the same. This suggests the consequence of the NCDC’s protocol for adjusting the data is to cause historical data to take on the time-line characteristics of urban data. The consequence intended or not, is to report a false rate of temperature increase for the Contiguous U.S.

Long's results are consistent with the well-known gap between adjusted surface station records and satellite measurements, the latter less susceptible to urbanization upward temperature bias:


source: Joseph D'Aleo & Anthony Watts, Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception?, at 8 (2010)

This is especially significant, as surface stations are becoming extinct, casting doubt on historical data homogeneity.

Conclusion: Carbon-forced climate change is dubious science, over-hyped, and under investigation. Surface station records must be rebuilt from scratch. And warming itself may be minuscule -- I agree with Luboš Motl:

[T]he adjusted data are made in such a way that the urban-rural difference largely disappears. But what's shocking is that the adjusted NCDC data are actually made to (approximately) agree with the urban, not rural raw station data! It means that the the urban effects were not eliminated. On the contrary, this urban warming has been added to the rural stations, too!

The "clean", purely natural rural figures have been contaminated by the bogus warming desired by the urban AGW believers.

[If accurate, Long's paper is] a potential bombshell. If he's right, the correct natural warming in the U.S. was around 0.1 °C per century, instead of 0.6 °C.

In other words, warming isn't a crisis: carbon cuts are unnecessary, as more expensive than ameiloration and adaptation. Sorry that won't support the sought-after socialism.

(via Watts Up With That?)