Sunday, July 6, 2014

Pristine siting, raw data, and US climate cooling

Article: Government Data Show U.S. in Decade-Long Cooling
Responding to widespread criticism that its temperature station readings were corrupted by poor citing issues and suspect adjustments, NOAA established a network of 114 pristinely sited temperature stations spread out fairly uniformly throughout the United States. Because the network, known as the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), is so uniformly and pristinely situated, the temperature data require no adjustments to provide an accurate nationwide temperature record.

According to the USCRN temperature readings, U.S. temperatures are not rising at all – at least not since the network became operational 10 years ago. Instead, the United States has cooled by approximately 0.4 degrees Celsius, which is more than half of the claimed global warming of the twentieth century.
[T]he USCRN data debunk claims that rising U.S. temperatures caused wildfires, droughts, or other extreme weather events during the past year. The objective data show droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather events have become less frequent and severe in recent decades as our planet modestly warms.
 "Issues:"
1) Since this only covers the last 10 years, and since "climate" is really a running, 15-year average, we can only call this a "trend." And the "trend" is not statisitically significant, because the time period is so short. On the other hand, the temperatures over the last 10 years, are certainly not rising.

2) US data is US data, not world-wide. However, since the world-wide data is also showing a slight cooling trend over the last 17 years, the US data is merely a confirmation of that trend.

Dr James Hansen, formerly of NASA's Goddard Center and one of the leading US voices arguing for anthropogenic global warming, has been been shown to be wrong about continued warming in the US (see article) over the last 17 years.

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