Homogenizing: Hey, if We Only Have Weather Stations in Urban Heat Islands and None in the Cooler, Higher, Rural Areas, You Know What We'll Do? We'll Just Use Our City Data to "Extrapolate" Into the Colder Rural Areas

This is what's going on with the Russia temperature data, too.

Turns out -- how could this be? I don't blame the warmmongers for it but how did this happen? -- the world has been losing, not gaining, temperature stations for the past 50 years, and most of the lost stations came from higher-latitude and higher-altitude, no-heat-island rural areas, in other words, the best, most pristine gauges of actual temperature, unchanged by the hot sprawl of Man.

And most of the ones that didn't get eliminated were in... cities. Or built up towns and suburbs. And mostly at lower altitudes, too (by sea level -- where most of the human population clusters).

And so what happens when the bulk of your old weather stations get discontinued?

Well, if you're a genius climate researcher, you just fill in these unmeasured expanses with homogenized (I think) type data from the city stations still in use.

Voila! You had no idea of what the temperature was in rural Russia so you guessed it was probably pretty close to the temperature in Moscow, and you filled it thus!

And look! Look at all this global warming and tremble.

You Know What's Going On Here? A dialogue.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: You know, there is some tentative evidence to suggest a link between carbon fraction and temperature.

POLITICIAN: Really? I'd sure like to be able to talk about that. You know I'm concerned about the environment!

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Here's my data.

POLITICIAN: I see a lot of fudge words and caveats in this "Summary for Policy-Makers."

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Well, you know, the fact is: There are huge areas of uncertainty. For one thing, we really don't have a very strong understanding of how the sun and clouds interact to shape climate.

POLITICIAN: I can't go to the public with all this hedging.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Okay, I changed that, I have now taken out the caveats about cloud formation and the sun. We have now, um, determined that they are not factors. How's it look?

POLITICIAN: You still have this caveat about "not having continuous temperature records for 80% of the earth's surface, making positive correlation very difficult to establish."

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Well, that's true, see, the world's been losing weather stations, and so there always were HUGE gaps in our data, and now they're even bigger...

POLITICIAN: I can't do anything with this. And damn, I was so close to getting you a big grant.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Hang on, I can fix that. Okay, here you go -- I just took the city temperatures and extrapolated them out into the hinterlands.

POLITICIAN: Is that, like, a valid assumption?

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Do you care?

POLITICIAN: Humor me.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Well... kinda-sorta.

POLITICIAN: And in scientific terms, "kinda-sorta" translates as...

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: No.

POLITICIAN: No?

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: No. Is it important?

POLITICIAN: Not really. Just seemed like the sort of thing I should pretend to be interested about. Okay, but what about this Medieval Warm Period? In the IPCC first report on this in 1990, you guys said it was warmer from 1000-1350 than it is now, and obviously that's not driven by human industry or agriculture. The world had no machines and only like one tenth of the current population.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: If that.

POLITICIAN: If that. So you see my problem.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Okay, hang on.

POLITICIAN: What's this?

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Hockey stick.

POLITICIAN: Hockey stick?

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Hockey stick.

POLITICIAN: Can you prove any of this?

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Again: How much do you care?

POLITICIAN: 'Nuff said. Okay, I think we've got some grant money coming your way!

Look, the problem here is that the data are simply unavailable to prove this one way or the other. The data do not exist.

But the warmongers have decided that that that's not fair, they're not going to let a little missing data stand in their way, because Mother Earth has told them she's in pain. And they are going to bend, fold, and mutilate whatever spotty records they do have until they can claim to have something approaching a temperature record of the whole earth extending back 1000 years.

posted by Ace at 04:33 PM

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