New AP Article on “Global Cooling Myth” Spins a Bad Study – UPDATED: Look where they put THIS ground station…

I saw the headline on the CBS web site “Statisticians: “Global Cooling” a Myth – Claims about Last 10 Years Are Deceptive; Temperatures Rise and Fall, But Overall Trend Is Higher”. Rest assured what is deceptive is this article that misrepresents what is already a bad study that stands in direct contradiction to a previous data set from the NCDC from January.

I was hoping that the Obama Administration had not politicized the National Climactic Data Center (NCDC) as they had the EPA when they suppressed a report showing how global warming skeptics are correct (LINK – LINK).

CBS/AP:

Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book.

Only one problem: It’s not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.

Ok time to stop right there, as has been documented by us (one example we reported LINK) and others such as the Media Research Center (example LINK, LINK, LINK and I could fill a page of links with examples of this problem), that almost always, the people the elite media portray as “independent” are people who are known to the reporter or news organization, with a known point of view, who will say what the reporter wants to report. The same few “random experts” appear in the elite media over and over and over again. It is a main component of how the elite media editorializes the news and hide the fact that in reality it is the news organizations editorial point of view they are presenting.

Why is IPCC author Dr. John Christy not a common talking head in the elite media?

CBS/AP continues:

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

“If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect,” said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.

Yet the idea that things are cooling has been repeated in opinion columns, a BBC news story posted on the Drudge Report and in a new book by the authors of the best-seller “Freakonomics.” Last week, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that only 57 percent of Americans now believe there is strong scientific evidence for global warming, down from 77 percent in 2006.

Global warming skeptics base their claims on an unusually hot year in 1998. Since then, they say, temperatures have dropped – thus, a cooling trend. But it’s not that simple.

Since 1998, temperatures have dipped, soared, fallen again and are now rising once more. Records kept by the British meteorological office and satellite data used by climate skeptics still show 1998 as the hottest year. However, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA show 2005 has topped 1998. Published peer-reviewed scientific research generally cites temperatures measured by ground sensors, which are from NOAA, NASA and the British, more than the satellite data.

The recent Internet chatter about cooling led NOAA’s climate data center to re-examine its temperature data. It found no cooling trend.

[Oh wait, could they mean this, UK Telegraph: 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved – UPDATED!. This was one of our little posts that went viral on the internet and got my little IUSB Vision Web Log pronounced the second most reviled web site on global warming by the Huffington Post. I really should buy Arianna a nice lunch for the publicity she gave me on that one – Chuck Norton]

Notice how they said that the study relies on ground sensors and pay special attention to the quote “recent Internet chatter about cooling led NOAA’s climate data center to re-examine its temperature data” …under NOOOOOO political pressure from the new administration I’m sure…

So I headed over to the WUWT blog to see if they had found the data that I was suspecting and sure enough. The data the story relies on comes from NOAA ground sensors and ignores the oceanic data sets and other important data sets. The NOAA ground censors have been discredited as controlled data because in a great many cases the NOAA censors are placed on or near asphalt, stone, heat vents, parking lots, surrounded by black tires in junk yards etc. all of which absorb heat during the day and release it at night. Also notice how the article states that they did not rely on satellite data that tends to show cooling and that presents another problem. According to alarmist global warming theory more warmth is trapped under the “greenhouse layer” of the atmosphere causing temperatures globally to rise. This layer of the atmosphere can be read by satellites and weather balloons (the John Christy method). So if you are to measure greenhouse warming according to the theory, that is the place to do it. However, measuring it that way does not give global warming alarmists the measurements they want.

Pielke Senior via WUWT:

This [AP] article, however, (which is not a true independent assessment if the study was completed by NOAA scientists) is not based on the much more robust metric assessment of global warming as diagnosed by upper ocean heat content. Nor does it consider the warm bias issues with respect to surface land temperatures that we have raised in our peer reviewed papers; e.g. see and see.

So as Pielke points out at WUWT, the “study” and the AP article doesn’t even address oceanic data sets. Nor does it address other data sets. It gets worse, would you like to see examples of NOAA ground sensors??

WUWT is up to part 91 of its “How not to measure temperature” series on these NOAA ground sensors.

Oh Look! Its a NOAA sensor in a junk yard with black tires.

Oh Look! Its a NOAA sensor next to that concrete porch and look to the left, its a grill. It has no cover so I guess it has been used pretty frequently.

Oh look! Its a NOAA sensor in a parking lot of asphalt. Would you like to walk barefoot on that on a warm summer day? I wonder how much heat the cars that park right next to it give off when the people who live in those apartments come home. Hey what is that a few yards behind the sensor? It's the heat pump for a home air conditioner!

But worry not scientific community and global warming alarmists, WUWT reports in “How not to measure temperature: Part 87” that NOAA “adjusts” for these types of anomalies….yup they adjust the temperatures DOWN in the PAST thus increasing the “current statistical warming trend”!! There are 91 of these ground sensors that WUWT has catalogued so far and they all seem to have one thing in common. They are placed in areas that will artificially make them read higher temperatures.

As we stated above, the new NCDC “study” ignored other data sets such as ITS OWN North American Temperature Data Set updated just last January… hmmm now what has happened between January and today….oh yes we have a new political administration that has already demonstrated that it has no problem trying to shut scientists up (LINK – LINK) who dare tell the truth about global warming.

As we reported January 10, 2009:

Yet ANOTHER dataset showing the cooling of the last 10 years.

NCDC now has December 2008 in the database. Annual North American temperature since 1998 (11 years of data) is falling over the period at a rate of 0.78(F)/decade or 7.8(F)per century. At this rate we will be in an ice age within 5 decades. If you can get the graphic, the heavy black line is the average over the century 1901 to 2000.

 

This data set is a collection of this continent only, but it shows the same cooling trend that other global data sets have shown. Since 1998 the Earth is cooling and it happens to coincide with a similar period of unusually low solar activity.

Of course we realize that to many people, including many radicalized professors, global warming alarmism is almost like a religion. No data set or series of data sets is going to put a dent in those people. Fortunately there are still plenty of people who are not zealots who can appreciate the information. Thanks to the famed WUWT Blog for the heads up.

Maybe this article can get the Huffington Post to rank me the number one most reviled global warming columnist on the internet. Being number two just seems so second best.

UPDATE – Via Anthony Watts:

Christy and McKittrick in the UK Times: doubts on station data.

A new story by Jonathan Leake in the Sunday Times puts the spotlight on surface temperature data.

Rome Airport Weather Station Behind Jet Engine Wash

Above: Rome’s airport weather station. Here is the interactive view

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.