Monday, May 6, 2019

Climate Science good news, and bad news

I've been complaining about the lousy state of the climate databases for basically the entire lifetime of this blog.  Here's one from 9 years ago:
Don emails to point out an article examining an astonishing statement from NOAA, the US Weather service:
The following remarkable statement now appears on the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) site:
For detecting climate change, the concern is not the absolute temperature — whether a station is reading warmer or cooler than a nearby station placed on grass — but how that temperature changes over time.
The root of the problem? NOAA’s network for measuring temperature in the United States has become corrupted by artificial heat sources and other issues.
My post title reflected the lackadaisical attitude of the Fed.Gov climate Pooh-Bahs: "Accuracy, schmacuracy."

Well, the good news is that NOAA seems to have taken the problem of poor station siting seriously, and has been funding an official study of the problem.  The results are in and (surprise!) poor siting does indeed impact temperature readings:
A field experiment was performed in Oak Ridge, TN, with four instrumented towers placed over grass at increasing distances (4, 30, 50, 124, and 300 m) from a built-up area. Stations were aligned in such a way to simulate the impact of small-scale encroachment on temperature observations. As expected, temperature observations were warmest for the site closest to the built environment with an average temperature difference of 0.31 and 0.24 °C for aspirated and unaspirated sensors respectively.
Well, duh.  But now it's Science®.  Better late than never - now let's see the impact on reported 20th Century warming.  The science seems pretty unsettled.

In the bad news department, the IMF wants $6T/year for "Climate Change" infrastructure.  How about "no"?  Or wait until there's been a scrub of the 20th Century reported warming to see what the impact of bad siting has been?

3 comments:

SiGraybeard said...

For detecting climate change, the concern is not the absolute temperature — whether a station is reading warmer or cooler than a nearby station placed on grass — but how that temperature changes over time.

Wow. Just wow. I mean, I could understand it if a first year student said that to you, but a professional?

Borepatch said...

Graybeard, yeah. That was my reaction when I posted about it in 2010.

Top. Men.

LSP said...

Was there ever such a scam of such epic proportions?