From Heartland Daily News

 H. Sterling Burnett

It is becoming increasingly clear that the temperature data the U.S. government and many other governments use to predict catastrophic climate change, the data from surface temperature stations, aren’t accurate.

To paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43: How bad is the surface station record? Let me count the flaws.

Even its climate alarmist defenders acknowledge that surface station data runs too hot. To make matters worse for the alarmist cause, the overheated surface station data are still lower than what climate models say the temperatures should be based on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This fact strongly suggests the assumed climate sensitivity to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide of pre-industrial levels built into models is also way too high.

Further evidence that the surface station data are flawed stems from the fact that the surface station readings do not match the temperatures recorded by global satellites and weather balloons, two alternative temperature sources whose data sets closely track each other.

The Heartland Institute has exposed instances in both the United States and abroad wherein official agencies tamper with past temperature data at pristine stations. Not only have these agencies been caught adjusting records to appear cooler than what was actually recorded, they have also manipulated temperatures upward, making the recent warming trend appear steeper and more severe than it actually is.

I’ve written extensively about the so-called adjustments made by corrupt NOAA scientists in 2015, just before the Paris climate treaty negotiations – mixing data from unbiased ocean buoys with heat-biased temperature measurements taken from ships’ engine water intake inlets, which made it appear as if the ocean was suddenly warming faster than before. More recent research claiming the oceans were heating up fast, seeming to confirm NOAA’s manipulated ocean claims, had to be corrected for overstating ocean warming or risk being withdrawn from publication.

My colleague, award-winning meteorologist Anthony Watts, working with a team of volunteers, independently documented serious problems with the official surface temperature record arising from the fact that the vast majority of temperature stations are poorly sited. In fact, these stations routinely fail to meet NOAA’s own standards for quality, which results in temperatures being skewed upward due to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect.

In 2009, and again in 2022, Watts detailed with station location data and photographic evidence just how woefully ill-sited these surface stations truly are. Stations providing official data were frequently sited in locations where surrounding surfaces, structures, and equipment radiated stored heat or emitted heat directly biased and drove the recorded temperatures higher than were recorded at stations in the same region that were uncompromised by the well-known UHI effect that is widely ignored by alarmists and official government agencies. Watts’ 2009 paper determined that 89 percent of the stations failed to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements.

The media and government bureaucrats took notice of Watts’ findings, the latter producing official responses that admitted the problem, while declaring the temperature record, despite the gross violation of established rules for sound temperature data collection, was still valid and reliable.

Even while claiming “no harm, no foul,” the U.S. government shuttered some of the most egregiously sited stations highlighted in Watts’ report and established an alternative temperature network, the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), consisting of new stations with state-of-the-art equipment sited in locations unlikely to ever be impacted by the UHI effect. The temperature data set from the USCRN, for anyone who cares, displays about half the warming and a slower rate of warming than the broader U.S. Historical Climate Network (USHCN) used by the government in its official reports claiming unprecedented warming. In fact, the data from the relatively few well-sited, unbiased USHCN stations, when compared to the network as a whole, also show half the warming reported by the government. The government has accurate data, it just doesn’t report or count it as official.

Simultaneously, the government added thousands of previously uncounted temperature stations maintained by various agencies and private parties to the official network – existing stations added without any quality control protocols.

The result of the latter effort was predictably disastrous from the perspective of producing a high quality, trustworthy record of surface temperatures uninfluenced by the UHI effect. Unfortunately, Watts’ 2022 report found that the situation has become even worse. Watts and his team of volunteers discovered that 96 percent of the stations surveyed in the NOAA’s expanded network failed its own quality control standards for siting, resulting in an UHI bias in the temperatures they report.

Now, an investigative report by Katie Spence, a journalist at The Epoch Times, exposes an additional problem with the U.S. surface temperature record – a failing arguably more egregious than the issues I’ve discussed so far: many “stations” allegedly “reporting” temperatures don’t actually exist anymore, and haven’t for years. The government is just making up the data reported from many locations based on an averaging of temperatures recorded at other locations in the area.

And it’s not just a few missing stations providing made-up numbers, pointed out Lt. Col. John Shewchuk, a certified consulting meteorologist, who was interviewed by Spence for the story.

“NOAA fabricates temperature data for more than 30 percent of the 1,218 USHCN reporting stations that no longer exist,” Shewchuk told Spence. “They are physically gone – but still report data – like magic.”

To this day, NOAA still relies upon temperature “data” from the ghost stations, with an “E” for estimate.

Watts was consulted for the story as well, explaining to The Epoch Times that, “[i]f this kind of process were used in a court of law, then the evidence would be thrown out as being polluted.”

While the surface data may be the best source we have, when it is as biased or even fabricated as it is increasingly found to be, there is no way it should be used to drive public policies limiting the freedom of billions of people in their personal and economic affairs, all in the vain hope of controlling the weather in the future.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By JASON ISAAC

They still haven’t learned their lesson.

For decades, politicians and climate activists have been setting deadlines for humanity, brazenly preaching that we have just a few years left to stave off our fiery doom. In fact, we were supposed to have passed the deadline for taking dramatic action to save the world in 2000, 2012, 2016 2020, and 2023.

The United Nations is now ramping up their rhetoric again, with climate executive secretary Simon Stiell boldly (and, apparently, not rhetorically) asking: “Who exactly has two years to save the world? The answer is every person on this planet.”

As usual, the U.N. couldn’t be more wrong when it comes to climate change. In fact, the science to which it demands blind loyalty shows there has never been a better time in human history to be alive.

One Obama energy advisor described our culture’s understanding of climate change as having “drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false.” He was not wrong. While celebrities, activists, politicians, and left-leaning CEOs are crying that the sky is falling, data shows that “[c]limate-related disasters kill 99% fewer people” than they did a century ago. Even though the world’s population has quadrupled over the same time period, the risk presented by mild warming has grown smaller and smaller.

Interestingly, our resilience to climate-related disasters is improving at a far faster rate than deaths from other natural disasters like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Clearly, the weather isn’t the culprit here.

In fact, even if the U.N. and its climate cartel were right, there is remarkably little we could do anyway. The data models their scientists use to project future warming show that even cutting every drop of oil and every grain of coal from our society would change global temperatures by at most a few hundredths of a degree. Those models, by the way, have overshot warming every time, making them a highly suspect justification for spending trillions to force our society to make dramatic changes for climate change. 

In fact, new studies cataloging 420,000 years of historical geological and weather data suggest that manmade greenhouse gas emissions are not strong enough to affect global temperatures.

So many of us, in our comfortably air-conditioned and Wi-Fi-enabled lives — far removed from the blue-collar energy producers toiling every day to power our society — have forgotten just how essential fossil fuels are to our existence. Our agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, public safety, utilities, banking, construction, entertainment and more would collapse without constant access to affordable, reliable energy.

Fossil fuels are the reason that the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has plummeted all over the world. In the pre-Industrial Revolution era, most of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty; 50 years ago it was about half the world population; today, it is less than 10%. Infant mortality, malnutrition and infectious diseases have plummeted while GDP, education, gender equality, economic freedom and life expectancy have skyrocketed.

The average child born today in any part of the world has a better chance at a long, healthy, and fruitful life than ever before — thanks, in part, to the life-saving and life-improving benefits of abundant energy.

We need only look to the pockets of the world still suffering from energy poverty to understand just how fortunate we are to live in 2024 instead of 1724. In communities without electricity — which nearly a billion people still don’t have and billions more have only sporadic access to — life expectancies still hover in the 50s and mere survival requires physical toil unimaginable to the average American.

Women walk for hours to collect unsanitary water and firewood or dung to burn in close quarters, exposing themselves to sexual assault and their whole families to deadly water-borne and lung disease. Children are fortunate to reach adulthood at all, let alone receive an education. Economic opportunity is close to nonexistent, even for men, outside subsistence farming.

Instead of protesting the fossil fuels that power our comfortable lives and spending trillions to possibly produce minute temperature change centuries from now, perhaps our world leaders should focus on solving the real problems facing real men, women, and children today. One of the easiest ways to do so is sharing the access to affordable, reliable energy we take for granted in the West.

I’ll keep embracing my high carbon lifestyle and hope that others get to do the same. See you in two years.

The Honorable Jason Isaac is CEO of the American Energy Institute and a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.