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Environment

Official Temperature Data Aren’t ‘Data’ and Shouldn’t Be Used to Restrict Freedom

Published

1 year ago

8 minute read

From Heartland Daily News

H. Sterling Burnett 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seeming to confirm NOAA’s manipulated ocean claims, had to be corrected for overstating ocean warming or risk being withdrawn from publication.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.

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., ([email protected]) is the director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research organization based in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

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WEF has a plan to overhaul the global financial system by monetizing nature

Published on September 24, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe of The Sociable

The WEF is plowing full steam ahead with the globalist agenda to monitor and monetize everything in nature, including the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the very earth we walk upon.

With billionaires Larry Fink and Andre Hoffmann as the new co-chairs, the World Economic Forum (WEF) publishes a 50-page blueprint on how to monetize everything in nature.

The WEF’s latest insight report, “Finance Solutions for Nature: Pathways to Returns and Outcomes,” provides “stakeholders” with dozens of financial solutions for monetizing everything in nature.

Nature pricing, biodiversity crediting schemes, natural asset companies, debt-for-nature swaps, and so much more are all packed into this agenda to overhaul the global financial system with nature-based activities:

The landscape of nature finance is rapidly evolving. From sovereign debt instruments and blended capital platforms to biodiversity credits and emerging asset classes, a growing range of mechanisms is being deployed to fund, finance and de-risk nature-positive action.

The WEF leadership page says that in their work on the board of trustees, “members do not represent any personal or professional interests.”

However, the target audiences for latest WEF insight report are “institutional investors, banks, asset managers, and development actors” – the very business interests that Hoffmann and Fink represent.

WEF interim co-chairs Larry Fink and Andre Hoffmann have everything to gain in their business dealings should the documentation, monetization, and tokenization of everything in nature ever come to full fruition.

And they are well on their way.

Hoffmann is also a key player in a whole host of so-called green financing initiatives, including biodiversity crediting schemes, through his various roles as founder, president, and chairman at several companies and NGOs such as: Innovate 4 Nature – the “accelerator for nature-positive solutions” and Systemiq – the “system change company” established specifically to advance U.N. Agenda 2030.

“The economy depends on natural resources. Their value derives not only from their use as direct inputs to production – such as timber for construction – but also for their benefits to society like living trees that help clean the air. Economists use the term “natural capital” to refer to the total value that natural resources provide to the economy and to people.” — BlackRock, Capital at risk: nature through an investment lens, August 2024

“Debt-for-nature swaps [DNS] are a financial mechanism that allow countries to restructure bilateral or multilateral debt in exchange for commitments to fund local conservation and restoration. They are also known as ‘debt-for-nature conversion.’” — WEF, Finance Solutions for Nature: Pathways to Returns and Outcomes, September 2025

Is your country millions, billions, or trillions in debt? No problem!

With debt-for-nature swaps, you can restructure your nation’s debt just by letting somebody else come in and take control of your natural resources under the guise of conservation and restoration, but what they’ll really be doing is forcing you to “take out private insurance policies to ‘mitigate the financial impact of natural disasters‘ as well as ‘political risk,’” as investigative journalists Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin report in Bitcoin Magazine.

Don’t have any money, but want to create value out of thin air, water, soil, or trees? You can set up natural asset companies that can “convert the full economic value of nature into financial flows via equity models.”

Want to help asset managers, bankers, and hedge fund execs get extremely rich while leaving you with only a tiny fraction? Go ahead and get involved in a Payment for Environmental Services (PES) scheme, where financial incentives are provided to individuals or communities in exchange for maintaining or restoring ecosystem services, like carbon sequestration or biodiversity conservation

And if you’re compliant with their rules, you can be rewarded by producing “positive nature and biodiversity outcomes (e.g. species, ecosystems and natural habitats) through the creation and sale of either land or ocean-based biodiversity units over a fixed period” with biodiversity credits, aka “environmental credits.”

Prefer to be left alone and live on the property that you worked hard for all your life? You better be compliant with all the environmental regulations that are coming in the name of preserving biodiversity, so that the $44 trillion of economic value generated by nature doesn’t diminish.

“Environmental credits are verified units of positive environmental outcomes, including biodiversity, water, carbon and nutrient credits. Though developed independently, projects increasingly blend credits via stacking, bundling or stapling.” — WEF, Finance Solutions for Nature: Pathways to Returns and Outcomes, September 2025

“Nature is rapidly emerging as a strategic investment frontier and more institutional capital is flowing into new business models and projects.” — WEF, Finance Solutions for Nature: Pathways to Returns and Outcomes, September 2025

In keeping with the own self-interests of the co-chairs and their business relations, the report highlights “10 priority financial solutions” for these stakeholders to implement:

  1. Sustainability-linked bonds (SLBs):
    • Commercial bonds tying coupon rates to nature-related targets for corporates or governments.
  2. Thematic (or use-of-proceeds) bonds:
    • Bonds with proceeds earmarked for nature projects. Scaling-up requires clearer guidance and aggregation to improve outcomes for issuers and investors.
  3. Sustainability-linked loans (SLLs):
    • Flexible debt, linking interest rates to nature-related targets. SLLs need simpler verification, standardized metrics and stronger triggers to drive nature-positive lending.
  4. Thematic (or use-of-proceeds) loans:
    • Loans for specific nature-related projects. Greater clarity on taxonomies and aggregation is needed to enhance capital flows.
  5. Impact funds:
    • Funds investing in nature-positive outcomes, often accepting higher risk or longer pathways to returns.
  6. Natural asset companies (NACs):
    • Publicly and privately listed companies that convert the full economic value of nature into financial flows via equity models. NACs hold significant potential but need more transactions for price discovery and replicable investment blueprints.
  7. Environmental credits:
    • Tradeable certificates for verified environmental benefits, used in compliance or voluntary markets.
  8. Debt-for-nature swaps (DNS):
    • Mechanisms to restructure sovereign debt in exchange for conservation or restoration commitments, with investable components including bonds and loans.
  9. Payments for ecosystem services (PES):
    • Contracts rewarding conservation for specific ecosystem services, driven by the public sector. Private sector schemes require longer contracts, aggregation and supply chain integration to scale up.
  10. Internal nature pricing (INP):
    • Unexplored, voluntary shadow pricing or fee-based tools to incentivize nature-positive performance in companies or across investment portfolios, similar to internal carbon pricing (ICP).

“While some components of nature – such as food, timber and ecotourism are priced and traded in global markets, the value of many critical ecosystem services remains undervalued….

Carbon sequestration, water filtration, flood protection and pollination are often treated as ‘free’ inputs, despite underpinning our economies and societies.” — WEF, Finance Solutions for Nature: Pathways to Returns and Outcomes, September 2025

“The natural capital approach extends the economic concept of capital to the environment, conceptualizing stocks of natural resources as conventional goods worth restoring, maintaining and enhancing for their productive flows.

This approach includes both accounting – embedding nature in national and corporate balance sheets – and valuation – pricing nature’s contributions into cost-benefit and investment analysis.” — WEF, Finance Solutions for Nature: Pathways to Returns and Outcomes, September 2025

Putting prices on water, air, and soil is a hot topic among globalists at the U.N., the G20, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the COP meetings.

At the WEF Annual Meeting in Davos this year, Singapore’s President Tharman Shanmugaratnam said that water credits and biodiversity credits should be “stapled” on to carbon credits.

The year prior, at the 2024 WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, aka “Summer Davos” meeting in communist China, University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership CEO Lindsay Hooper told the panel on “Understanding Nature’s Ledger” that every part of the economy depends on nature, and that in order to protect natural systems, one solution would be to “bring nature onto the balance sheet.”

In addition to putting “nature on the balance sheet,” another proposal coming at the end of the panel discussion suggested putting a tax on natural systems like water in the same vein as carbon taxes.

With putting prices on nature comes tokenization and derivatives.

At least that’s what former Bank of England adviser Michael Sheren said at COP27 in November 2022.

“Carbon, we already figured out, and carbon is moving very quickly into a system where it’s going to be very close to a currency, basically being able to take a ton of absorbed or sequestered carbon and being able to create a forward-pricing curve, with financial service architecture, documentation,” said Sheren.

And with carbon being close to a currency, “There are going to be derivatives.”

Now, under the newfound leadership of Fink and Hoffmann, whose personal business dealings stand everything to gain, the WEF is plowing full steam ahead with the globalist agenda to monitor and monetize everything in nature, including the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the very earth that we walk upon.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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Alberta

How Alberta is moving to speed up oil sands reclamation with mine water treatment

Published on September 20, 2025

By

From the Canadian Energy Centre

By Deborah Jaremko

New standards to build on rules already in place for other mining sectors

In what the former Chief of the Fort McKay First Nation calls “a critical step in the right direction,” the Alberta government is moving to accelerate reclamation of more than 1.3 trillion litres of water stored in oil sands tailings ponds.

On Sept. 5, the province announced it will expedite setting standards that allow for “mine water” to be treated and released into the environment, building on the rules that are already in place for other mining operations across Canada.

“We cannot ignore this challenge, we need to keep working together to find practical and effective solutions that protect Indigenous rights, people and the environment,” said Chief Jim Boucher, a member of Alberta’s Oil Sands Mine Water Steering Committee.

That committee is behind a suite of nine recommendations that Alberta is putting into action to improve mine water management and tailings pond reclamation.

The Mining Association of Canada (MAC) says decades of research give the industry confidence that mine water can be safely treated and released once regulations are in place.

But that will take the federal government moving faster too.

Both the federal and provincial governments play a role in potential regulations for the treatment and release of oil sands mine water.

“Alberta is proposing science-based parameters to ensure the safe return of treated water used in oil sands mining, just as other provincial governments do for their respective mining sectors,” MAC CEO Pierre Gratton said in a statement.

“We are hopeful that this will accelerate the development of federal regulations – which we requested almost 15 years ago – to be similarly advanced.”

Gratton said setting standards for safe mine water release could unlock “significant investments” in oil sands reclamation and water treatment.

What are tailings ponds?

Tailings are a byproduct of mining operations around the world.

Oil sands tailings ponds are engineered basins holding a mix of mine water, sand, silt, clay and residual bitumen generated during the extraction process. There are eight operating oil sands mines with tailings ponds in northern Alberta.

Recycling water held in these basins helps operators reduce the amount of fresh water withdrawn from the Athabasca River.

In 2023, 79 per cent of the water used for oil sands mining was recycled, according to the Alberta Energy Regulator.

What is oil sands mine water?

Oil sands mine water is water that comes into contact with the various stages of oil sands mining operations, including bitumen extraction and processing.

Tailings ponds in the oil sands also hold water from significant amounts of rain and snow collected in the decades since the first mines began operating.

While the oil sands mining sector has reduced the amount of fresh water it uses per barrel of oil produced by nearly one-third since 2013, the total volume of mine water in tailings storage has grown as production has increased.

What’s in oil sands mine water? 

The constituents of oil sands mine water requiring treatment for safe release are both typical of water in other industrial processes and unique to the oil sands sector.

MAC says common materials are suspended solids like sand, silt and clay, as well as a range of metals. These can be treated by a wide range of proven technologies already in use in Canada and globally.

Unique to oil sands mine water are organic compounds such as naphthenic acids. According to MAC, operators have demonstrated and continue to invest in processes to treat these to levels safe for environmental release.

How does mine water impact reclamation? 

At the end of an oil sands mine’s life, operators must remove all infrastructure and restore the land to features of a self-sustaining boreal forest similar to what was there before.

Addressing the challenge of tailings ponds and the mine water stored in them is critical to the overall success of oil sands mining reclamation.

Why is mine water release important?

MAC says the only way to remove mine water in tailings ponds is to treat it for safe release to the environment.

Strict regulations allow for this process across Canadian copper, nickel, gold, iron ore, and diamond mining operations. But it is prohibited in the oil sands.

The safe release of treated oil sands mine water into the environment can reduce the need to store it, minimize further land disturbance and help reclamation happen faster.

MAC says operators have shown they can treat mine water to safe release levels, using processes that include innovative technologies developed through Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance.

What is Alberta doing? 

Alberta has accepted the Oil Sands Mine Water Steering Committee’s nine recommendations aimed at speeding up solutions for safe mine water release.

The province says the recommendations, developed with input from industry, technology providers, Indigenous communities and scientists, will now be evaluated to determine how they can be put into practice.

Read the full recommendations here.

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