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

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seeming to confirm NOAA’s manipulated ocean claims, had to be corrected for overstating ocean warming or risk being withdrawn from publication.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

Evidence does not support ‘climate crisis’ claims

Published on September 7, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

The federal Liberal government “committed over $160 billion… to support our green economy” from 2015 to 2024, and proposes to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035, all on the premise that there’s a climate change crisis. And it’s spent many millions trying to convince Canadians there’s a climate emergency. But is that true?

A recent report (authored by John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick and Roy Spencer) and disseminated by the U.S. Department of Energy provides a very different view.

The report examined how carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions (as a result of human activity) have affected or will affect climate, extreme weather and other metrics of societal wellbeing. While the report examines the United States, other research suggests what most people intuitively know—because Canada’s climate is colder, global warming could produce higher benefits and lower costs for Canada than the U.S. For example, Canada’s agriculture and tourism industries would likely benefit from warmer temperatures.

So what does the report say? One observation is that “most extreme weather events in the U.S. do not show long-term trends. Claims of increased frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts are not supported by U.S. historical data.” Moreover, “forest management practices are often overlooked in assessing changes in wildfire activity.” The same could be said in Canada. There’s good evidence that bad government management of forests—rather than primarily climate change—is to blame for much of the recent wildfire activity.

The authors of the report further emphasize that claims of human activity causing climate disasters are shaky: “Attribution of climate change or extreme weather events to human CO2 emissions is challenged by natural climate variability, data limitations, and inherent model deficiencies.”

A separate article in Regulation Magazine by policy analyst David Kemp makes the same point. Kemp notes that according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), even under an implausible worst-case climate change scenario, it would not be until 2050 to 2100 that heavy rain increases to a point where a real upward trend, beyond what would be considered natural statistical noise, would emerge. For droughts, cyclones, severe storms, river floods, landslides and fire weather, it would take until at least 2100.

The Department of Energy report also finds that “global climate models generally run ‘hot’ in their description of the climate of the past few decades—too much warming at the surface and too much amplification of warming in the lower- and mid-troposphere.” In general, therefore, many projections of future global warming and associated economic damages are “exaggerated.”

In the final chapter of their report, the authors conclude government actions in the U.S., including aggressive regulatory measures, “are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays.”

In Canada, government policies would have only a fraction of the “undetectably small” impacts U.S. government policies could have on climate. As of 2022, Canada accounted for only 1.4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with emissions from China (19.2 times higher) and the U.S. (8.4 times higher) much higher than emissions from Canada. That’s unsurprising given Canada’s much smaller population and economy.

When federal politicians or climate activists next claim there’s a climate crisis or climate emergency, or that the latest weather disaster was the result of climate change due to human activity, and that government must take significant and costly measures to reduce climate change, Canadians should be skeptical. The evidence simply does not support such claims.

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute

Business

U.S. rejection of climate-alarmed worldview has massive implications for Canada

Published on September 1, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Kenneth P. Green

The United States Department of Energy recently published a report, which essentially summarizes the U.S. government’s rejection of the 30-year-old, United Nations-centric, climate-alarmed consensus worldview.

In short, the report rejects the idea that carbon dioxide (CO2)—manmade or otherwise—constitutes a traditional pollutant—that is, a substance which is out of its natural role/place in the environment, and is causing harm. Rather, according to the report, CO2 is more properly seen as a fertilizer: manmade CO2 additions to the atmosphere do take the “carbon” out of a natural reservoir and put it into the air, but the effect is not toxic nor harmful. Rather, additional CO2 stimulates plant growth around the world, causing a well-documented phenomenon of “global greening.”

The report also disputes predictions that human emissions of CO2 (or other greenhouse gases) will result in dangerous climate warming or other dangerous knock-on effects such as changes to extreme weather of various sorts (floods, droughts, storms, wildfires). Such claims, the report holds, are exaggerated.

The report also, not surprisingly, diverges from the UN-climate-alarmed consensus idea that the solution to climate change risk is global greenhouse gas (GHG) emission suppression. Rather, when it comes to policy, the report comes down firmly on the idea of adaptation to potential climate disruptions, regardless of cause: “Technological advances such as improved weather forecasting and early warning systems” have substantially reduced losses from extreme weather events. Better building codes, flood defences and disaster response mechanisms have lowered economic losses relative to GDP. Further, heat-related mortality risk has dropped substantially due to adaptive measures including the adoption of air conditioning (which relies on a robust economy) and the availability of affordable energy. “U.S. mortality risks… even under extreme warming scenarios are not projected to increase if people are able to undertake adaptive responses.”

What does this mean for Canada?

First, one must assume that it portends a continued U.S. movement away from GHG mitigation efforts and programs involving direct emission suppression from sources such as power plants, manufacturing facilities, vehicles, commercial and residential buildings, and so forth.

It will also likely mean less intrusive efforts to suppress GHG emissions indirectly with various energy efficiency standards, agricultural practices and the mandated replacement of GHG-emission power production with lower/less-GHG emitting wind and solar technologies. Oh, and once again, the much-ballyhooed transition from internal combustion transportation to electric vehicles is likely to take it in the neck, at least in the U.S. for the next four years.

Again, what does this mean for Canada? In a nutshell, it means the U.S. will cut a fairly large amount of spending on GHG suppression measures while Canada (Carney government, et al) plans to increase such spending. And the U.S. will also cut spending—and consumer costs—for electric vehicles while Canada will increase both. Because virtually all of the U.S. focus is about lowering the costs of energy and the technologies that use it—and energy is the foundational input of developed economies—all of that will likely make the U.S. more economically competitive, from the individual to the firm, compared to Canada.

The more Canada elbows up and doubles down on joining the UN’s GHG-suppression regime, the less competitive Canada will make itself compared to the U.S., which—Trump’s tariffs and current politics notwithstanding—remains the most relevant touchstone for whether or not Canadian policies are economically rational.