The town I used to live near was famous for its coldness. The locals were proud of this.
Then, someone (government?) decided that the "official temperature" should be recorded at the airport instead of at the radio station just outside of town (about halfway between town and my house). So, instead of being in a pasture, the "official" thermometer was now located around buildings and a large expanse of concrete.
Guess what result that had-- it made the "official temperature" for town several degrees higher. We stopped regularly being the coldest spot in the lower 48-- at least, "officially". People complained but it wasn't switched back.
I'm not saying that one reading was more accurate than the other, just that they were different and that there are good reasons for the difference which have nothing to do with "global warming".
Yet Anthropogenic Global Climate Change (AGCC) believers would take this data and use it as indisputable evidence for global warming. It is real, scientific, and believable-- the temperatures officially recorded for that town now really are warmer than the temperatures officially recorded there in the past-- and it is misleading.
How often has this happened in other places? Has it happened this way more often than the "official thermometers" either staying in the same place or moving to a spot where the temperature would generally be lower?
It's a good reason to remain skeptical.
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Reminder: I could really use some help.
Excellent example, Kent! It is just astonishing that so much AGW propaganda is based on data so very difficult to measure.
ReplyDeleteI have a comparable case at home. A thermometer just outside a window that is nearly always in the shade reads 3 or 4 degrees F lower than what the temperature is in the roadway 100 feet away.
The idea that anyone can measure average global temps to fractions of a degree is pure hokum.
The notion is absurd that a meaningful average global temperature with error bars small enough to measure year to year changes can exist, given that swaths of the globe (such as most of Antarctica) have no measure of temperature at ground level. It's like having 100 measurements of population density in different parts of NYC, LA, and Chicago, and 1 in a single flyover state, and then saying average population density in the entire U.S. is X amount.
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