Global Warming or Bad Data?
Garbage in...
Al Gore likes to say that the science of
climate change is “settled.” But of course, science, almost by
definition, is never settled.
And climate science has always suffered from the
problem of shaky and missing data. Seventy percent of the globe is
covered by ocean, where data is hard to collect. Reliable weather
records only go back to about 1850 and, in many parts of the world, are
far more recent. Modern recording weather stations date only to the
early 20th century.
And many of those stations have a big
problem. While they haven’t changed appreciably over the years, the land
around them has changed, often profoundly, with the great growth in
urban and suburban areas. The weather station that was put, say, in the
middle of a Nassau County, Long Island, potato field in 1923 is still in
the same spot. But the potatoes are long gone, and now it’s behind a
strip mall, twenty feet from the kitchen exhaust fan of a Chinese
take-out joint.
A
study by
meteorologist Anthony Watts found that almost 90 percent of the 1221
weather stations in the U.S. did not meet the National Weather Service’s
setting standards, which requires that they be at least 100 feet from
any artificial heat source or radiating surface. You can see some of the
most egregious violators
here.
To deal with this defective information, climate scientists, have
“adjusted” the data to solve this problem. Invariably, these adjustments
have made earlier data show lower temperatures, and recent data show
higher ones.
To develop reliable data, the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) placed 114
state-of-the-art weather stations relatively evenly spaced about the
lower 48 states. They were carefully sited to be away from urban areas,
which are heat islands, airports, which can be affected by jet exhaust,
etc.
The system became operative in 2005. Now, realclearenergy.com is
reporting
that there has been no increase in average temperatures in the
continental United States over the last 14 years, as measured by these
new stations. If anything, overall temperatures are slightly cooler than
they were.
One big reason for this lack of warming is surely
the explosion in U.S. natural gas production,
thanks to fracking. The U.S. is now, by far, the number-one producer of
natural gas, producing 90 billion cubic feet a day, 25 percent more
than second-place Russia. This has brought the price of natural gas to
its lowest point in 20 years, which has resulted in a big shift from
producing power by burning coal to burning natural gas, which produces
50 percent less carbon dioxide. (The shale gas revolution has vast
geopolitical implications, of course, as well as climatic ones.)
As a result, the U.S. CO2 emissions are
down to where they were in 1985–a third of a century ago, when the GDP
was half what it is now in inflation-adjusted terms, and the population
was smaller by a quarter. No other industrialized country has come
anywhere close to reducing their emissions by so much.
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