http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/steigerwald/s
_513013.html

Helping along global warming

By Bill Steigerwald
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, June 17, 2007


Remember in January when the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) and its good friends in media trumpeted that 2006 was the warmest year
on record for the contiguous United States?
NOAA based that finding - which allegedly capped a nine-year warming streak
"unprecedented in the historical record" - on the daily
temperature data that
its National Climatic Data Center gathers from about 1,221 mostly rural weather
observation stations around the country.

Few people have ever seen or even heard of these small, simple-but-reliable
weather stations, which quietly make up what NOAA calls its United States
Historical Climatology Network (USHCN).

But the stations play an important role in detecting and analyzing regional
climate change. More ominously, they provide the official baseline historical
temperature data that politically motivated global-warming alarmists like James
Hansen of NASA plug into their computer climate models to predict various
apocalypses.


story continues below




NOAA says it uses these 1,221 weather stations -- which like the ones in
Uniontown and New Castle are overseen by local National Weather Service offices
and usually tended to by volunteers -- because they have been providing
reliable temperature data since at least 1900.
But Anthony Watts of Chico, Calif., suspects NOAA temperature readings are not
all they're cracked up to be. As the former TV meteorologist explains on his
sophisticated, newly hatched Web site surfacestations.org, he has set out to do
what big-time armchair-climate modelers like Hansen and no one else has ever
done - physically quality-check each weather station to see if it's being
operated properly.

To assure accuracy, stations (essentially older thermometers in little
four-legged wooden sheds or digital thermometers mounted on poles) should be
100 feet from buildings, not placed on hot concrete, etc. But as photos on
Watts' site show, the station in Forest Grove, Ore., stands 10 feet from an
air-conditioning exhaust vent. In Roseburg, Ore., it's on a rooftop near an AC
unit. In Tahoe, Calif., it's next to a drum where trash is burned.

Watts, who says he's a man of facts and science, isn't jumping to any rash
conclusions based on the 40-some weather stations his volunteers have checked
so far. But he said Tuesday that what he's finding raises doubts about NOAA's
past and current temperature reports.

"I believe we will be able to demonstrate that some of the global warming
increase is not from CO2 but from localized changes in the
temperature-measurement environment."

Meanwhile, you probably missed the latest about 2006. As NOAA reported on May 1
- with minimum mainstream-media fanfare - 2006 actually was the second- warmest
year ever recorded in America, not the first. At an annual average of 54.9
degrees F, it was a whopping 0.08 degrees cooler than 1998, still the hottest
year.

NOAA explained that it had updated its 2006 report "to reflect revised
statistics" and "better address uncertainties in the instrumental
record." This
tinkering is standard procedure. NOAA always scientifically tweaks temperature
readings for various reasons -- weather stations are moved to different
locations, modernized, affected by increased urbanization, etc.

NOAA didn't say whether it had adjusted for uncertainties caused by nearby burn
barrels.


Bill Steigerwald is the Trib's associate editor. Call him at (412) 320-7983.
E-mail him at: bsteigerwald{at}tribweb.com.

--- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10