Oh, My: Another Key Global Warming Study Appears Faked

The heat island effect: The fact that most weather stations have had cities (or towns, at least) grow up around them, so that what once used to be a patch of grass in the shade of trees is now most likely a paved-over heat-absorbing slab of asphalt with building and car exhaust blowing at it all day long.

Critics of claims of catastrophic warming have always pointed out this problem. The weather stations you are using, they say, are simply different than they were in the 1940s. Then, they were in fairly cool, natural places; now, they are largely in urbanized areas, with the heat of human and mechanical activity pumping them with artificial heat all the time.

Oh, don't sweat that, came the response. You see -- we have a study. Our study shows the heat-island effect is no big deal. Not at all! We can use those stations which were once wreathed in shady leaf and now sit upon baking black asphalt with only the most trivial of adjustments.

Yeah, well.

You know how these "studies" tend to be.

Surely the most worrying sign for the thuggish enforcers of "settled science" is that even the eco-lefties at the Guardian and the Independent, two of the most gung-ho warm-mongers on the planet, are beginning to entertain doubts. From the Independent:

Professor Jones and a colleague, Professor Wei-Chyung Wang of the State University of New York at Albany suggested in an influential 1990 paper in the journal Nature that the urban heat island effect was minimal – and cited as supporting evidence a long series of temperature measurements from Chinese weather stations, half in the countryside and half in cities, supplied by Professor Wei-Chyung. . . .

However, it has been reported that when climate sceptics asked for the precise locations of the 84 stations, Professor Jones at first declined to release the details. And when eventually he did release them, it was found that for the ones supposed to be in the countryside, there was no location given.

Oh, right. Very scientific. From the Guardian:

It also emerges that documents which Wang claimed would exonerate him and Jones did not exist. . . .

Wang said: "I have been exonerated by my university on all the charges. When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more."

Ah, yes. The old dog-ate-my-tree-rings excuse yet again.

And, as the link notes, this is almost more of a media scandal. Because they allowed these charlatans to claim whatever they liked, so long as it fit the narrative, and thereby encouraged and nurtured the greatest anti-scientific fraud in history.

posted by Ace at 05:22 PM

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