The developing scandal of faulty weather-station data and corrupted datasets has turned up another important lead--in the Antarctic. Two climate science bloggers, following a lead sent to them by an amateur statistician, now report that the Global Historical Climate Network dataset (GHCN) uses data from one single station to demonstrate a severe warming trend for the entire continent of Antarctica. Worse yet, this station is located on Antarctica's Palmer Peninsula, and the station itself is poorly sited--on the grounds of a major research station and hence subject to the equivalent of urban heat island (UHI) effects.
Anthony Watts of WattsUpWithThat, and Jeff Id at The Air Vent, first noticed a post on the Save Capitalism blog, by an admitted amateur who noticed that the raw data for all of Antarctica suggested an average temperature rise of about 1 Kelvin (equivalent to a Celsius degree) per century. The adjusted data contained only a relative handful of datasets (18 out of 110), and those sets yielded an upward trend of 4.47 K/century. The removed datasets produced a nearly flat temperature trend.
I am sorry boys and girls, but there simply is no way in [censored] that you can “accidentally” remove all series that show less of an upward trend, and settle for 18 of the most upward trending series (thus raising the warming / century by 3 degrees!). I don’t know how they do things with the GHCN dataset, or who is responsible for this, but just like New Zealand this is pretty damning evidence that all the “adjustments” are done to deliberately corrupt data to cause specific trends.
The Save Capitalism blogger was referring to an allegation that the New Zealand National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) had deliberately introduced selection bias into its own climate record. Anthony Watts later found that many of New Zealand's weather stations were badly sited and subject to Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects.
The same thing appears to be the case in the Antarctic controversy. Jeff Id replicated the original findings on Save Capitalism and published them this morning. He also determined that all of the retained datasets came from one single station--the Rothera Point station, at the extreme end of the Palmer Peninsula. This station, according to Id, "has the single highest trend of any of the adjusted station data."
As well it might, for, as Anthony Watts illustrates with a set of well-chosen photographs, the weather station's Stevenson screen (part of the thermometer apparatus) can be seen within a few paces of one of the Quonset-type huts that make up Rothera Point station. Furthermore, Rothera Point is a well-developed mini-city, having its own airfield with runway and hangar, and a coffeehouse. Some of the photographs appear to show that Rothera Point opens itself to tourists. This implies that Rothera Point sees a lot of visitors, many more than does the usual Antarctic expeditionary station.
All this activity produces predictable UHI effects. Equally predictably, this shows up in the temperature record, for GHCN and GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, NASA).
This finding is especially important on account of the construction that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarmists routinely place on the possible melting of Antarctic continental ice. If sea ice melts, whether in the Arctic Ocean or in the Weddel, Ross, or other seas of Antarctica, that presents no problem, because ice floating in water cannot add materially to the volume of that water as it melts, according to a statement referenced here from Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (and easily demonstrable by any amateur investigator with a drinking glass filled with ice water). But if land ice melts, then the resulting water is likely to run off into the sea, thus increasing its total mass and volume.
Thus any significant warming trend in the Antarctic would be problematic--but not if that warming is in fact spurious and entirely the product of data selection bias, improper siting of measurement instruments, and other causes of systematic error.
Previous articles:
- New Zealand climate agency accused of data manipulation
- NIWA press release less than satisfactory
- Global weather dataset being systematically corrupted
- Globe might actually be cooling
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Comments
AGW proponents are nothing more than "Data Molesters", and they are in denial that this is immoral because their closest friends and associates all do it as well.
Having escaped New Zealand, I can tell the world that Kiwis are mentally retarded yet try to play the morally superior card all the time. They don't like to admit that their best and brightest leave the country for good every generation... this generation, one fifth of the population have left the country. Guess what this does to the gene pool? It is no surprise that NIWA are staffed by second rate scientists that believe the end justifies the means.
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