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As if SurfaceStations.Org didn't have enough fun looking at all the existing poor weather stations, here comes a whole new batch of odd locations to look at.

No, that's the measurements of the Urban Heat Island effect and James Hansens personal secret closed source "correction algorithm". If you really want to know something about temperatures, you should look at the UAH satellite data.

http://surfacestations.org/ on GISS and UHI
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/uah-temperature-up-in-november/ on UAH global temperatures

This has nothing to do with the temperature of the earth in general. No one is using a thermometer in cities and averaging them out.

That's exactly how it is done. Please visit http://surfacestations.org/ to see what a problem it is, as well.

Do you know how many measurements they're averaging those with?

I do know how many are used for the surface record. Its well documented and the data is available online. What isn't well documented is the placement of those thermometers. The scientists harping on climate change simply don't give a shit, which is obvious since they dont even bother visiting these sites to see what problems may exist.

How big of a temperature shift you'd expect from a misplaced thermometer?

Not as much as if there were hundreds of misplaced thermometers just in the USHCN. Didn't expect a big problem with the quality of the surface record, did you? The problems the scientists say do not exist are now well documented with photographic evidence. This is a classic case of garbage in garbage out. Maybe its warming significantly, maybe it isn't. We don't know because the data we have just plain sucks.

I suggest you begin your research at http://www.surfacestations.org/

The biggest pusher of the "climate change" scare is the IPCC, a political organization trying to heavily regulate industry on a global scale. If it looks like an attempt at a power grab, it probably is.

You may want to keep an eye out for this temperature station monitoring project. Over the next decade they're going to actually do the first world-wide check on urban heat island bias. They're about halfway done with the USA and going international after that effort is complete.

There isn't just problems with one data set, but multiple ones.

Surface temperatures. You know - the stations extremely affected by urbanization. The link I gave is for satellite troposhpere temperatures, less affected by heat zones around cities but still an area where AGW should have a huge effect.

For more info on why you shouldn't trust surface data: http://surfacestations.org/

I'm not sure what that rant was supposed to achieve.
If you have other data then provide it.

If the only data you have is wrong, it's still wrong.

It really doesn't matter. We have no idea what the climate is going to do. All we know for sure is that the climate will change and we will adapt. I'm tired of hearing that we're doomed if the climate gets warmer and we are doomed if it gets cooler. Well, I guess we are doomed because it is going to do one or the other.

Forest Grove, OR (air conditioner exhaust blowing directly on temperature shelter, nearby asphalt and buildings)

Aberdeen, WA ( large heat source: sewage treatment plant - nearby parking, hot automobile radiators )

Right, random moron mouthing off on slashdot with the usual "correlation not equal to causation" bromide (which you didn't phrase accurately) must be believed over the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic global warming/climate change.

Ahhh, your overwhelming scientific consensus again. Words from the holy gospel at Realclimate.org. Let us read about it, shall we? From your article:

The main points that most would agree on as "the consensus" are:

1. The earth is getting warmer (0.6 +/- 0.2 oC in the past century; 0.1 0.17 oC/decade over the last 30 years (see update)) [ch 2]
2. People are causing this [ch 12] (see update)
3. If GHG emissions continue, the warming will continue and indeed accelerate [ch 9]
4. (This will be a problem and we ought to do something about it)

I've put those four points in rough order of certainty. The last one is in brackets because whilst many would agree, many others (who agree with 1-3) would not, at least without qualification.

Wow, that just oozes confidence, doesn't it... but let's look at the individual points made here:

1. Assuming the measurements are accurate. Arriving at a global mean temperature is voodoo enough, but when you place your surface temperature measuring stations beside air conditioning unit exhaust vents you have to wonder if the temperatures even reflect reality. Most of these stations surveyed have a margin of error in recording temperatures of more than 2C... while your measured catastrophic increase is 0.6C?? Next stop, measuring your member with an unmarked ruler. "Hey, it's about a foot long. Really!!"
2. How much of it are we causing exactly? We can all grapple with the idea that CO2 helps keep the planet warm and we are creating a lot of it. What I have yet to get out of any single climatologist is a hard number. Exactly how many degrees hotter is it going to be in 5 or 10 years. I take that back... The IPCC gave us a hard number in 1990. Sure enough, five years later they were WAY OFF. They've since started making *unverifiable in our lifetime* predictions 100 years out. Fantastic!
3. We're now glossing over point 2 and making broad assumptions. Nevermind that "To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today-- 4400 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming." [Source] Hmmm... what's the phrase I'm looking for here... something about correlation and causation.
4. This last one brings us to the ultimate death blow to the global warmers' argument. The warming we've experienced since the last glacial period has brought us grasslands, forests, jungles.... When the next glacial period comes, the planet will be covered mostly by icy tundra and extreme deserts again. Warming has only made this planet MORE habitable to us. I've got 12000 years of proof that warming is good. What do you have to the contrary?

As for "I don't understand where these people are coming from saying that warmer temperatures are bad", try asking the people in coastal areas and island nations such as Tuvalu, who have already been displaced, what they feel.

Sure, and while I'm at it, why don't you ask the entire population of blue states in the north eastern US if they'd like to be buried under a mile of ice again any time soon. That has always puzzled me.

What? How dare you suggest that computer models don't provide an accurate substitute for reality, and are not a solid substitute for real science! Next thing you know people might question Global Climate Models. That could lead to demanding publicly available data instead of "proprietary" data and scrutiny of the millions of dollars spent on models instead of things like updating the proxies, auditing the monitoring stations, and perhaps even demanding open debate.

There is nothing politically charged about black holes, or even supermassive ones. As such, the quote above about the models being proven wrong by reality is easily accepted and non-controversial. Unlike, say GCM that fail to predict say El Nino. The physicists understand that models are a useful tool for seeing what you don't know, but are not science, nor are they to be accepted as reality.

At least an interested group of amateurs are working to replicate some of the more controversial research results (e.g. the Britta reconstruction, MBH hockey stick, and the GISS temperature record). See http://www.climateaudit.org/ and http://www.surfacestations.org/ for more.

I followed your links. If you note here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/sta tion_list.txt
Wickenburg is listed as a "rural" station (It's near Phoenix):

---ID---- Legend: R/S/U=rural/sm.town/urban A/B/C=dark/dim/bright cc=country-code brightness-index
722780090 WICKENBURG lat,lon (.1deg) 340 -1127 R3C cc=425 16

Here are some nice photos of the "rural" Wickenburg station:

http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_ite mId=1610

Does this look rural to you? See any problems? I will help you out. It's next to a building, blacktop, and HUGE air conditioners. This totally violates the guidelines for locating a station.

So here we have a bad (they think it's good?) "rural" station that is likely/possibly/who knows? used to adjust the Phoenix/Tucson temps.

Now, smart guy, follow your own link and _show_ me how this "rural" station was/wasn't used to correct the Phoenix and Tucson urban temps. You can't, because the detail on exactly what individual adjustments were made is not there. Go ahead, prove me wrong!

-SlashNut

P.S.
The mod system SUCKS here at Slashdot. The parent should NOT be a 5. Just pointing people at a dump of lots of INCOMPLETE data doesn't prove your point. Replies that point this out are modded 0 or 1.

Didn't we already have this discussion a while ago when sombody posted observations from http://www.surfacestations.org/

Have you seen http://www.surfacestations.org/ ?

It's a site dedicated to looking at the surface stations which the data comes from and auditing their compliance with the US Weather Station rules.

So far a lot have been found to be faulty. A post above puts it stronger - in many cases we seem to be measuring the spread of air conditioning!

The issue here is not the size of the error. It's the existence of the error and NASA's attitude to it. They refused to provide any base data for checking and Steve's Audit site was DDOSed when this story came out. He had to reverse engineer everything to prove them wrong, and now they're trying to hide it.

To try to get accurate climate data, an independent organisaton of bloggers has set up a surface stations auditing site, at http://www.surfacestations.org/ . Look at it, and see where a lot of the dodgy figures are coming from!

The stories you link to seemed damning at first sight, so I went to the site that they referenced. They have a page devoted to "odd stations" where they list the stations that are obviously bad. Of the 281 stations surveyed so far, 9 were placed on the "odd stations" page. The dailytech article refers to this as "a surprising number" but it doesn't seem so terrible to me. Of course, the descriptions in the article were taken from the worst of the 9 bad sites, but they made it sound as though those descriptions were somehow representative.

In the interest of fairness, I should point out that surfacestations.org has obviously been updated since the blog was posted. At the time of writing, only 48 sites had been surveyed; that number is now 281.

The surfacestations project was systematically investigating possible skew to the all-important temperature data, and has thus put the climate researchers "on the spot" in at least a few cases.

TFA notes that Anthony Watts has posted about it on his site. You might know Watts as the head of the surfacestations.org project, which contends that the surface warming trend recorded in the U.S. is the result of various data collection problems like the urban heat island effect. But now it looks like that warming trend was overstated--weakening the very purpose of the surfacestations project. Somehow I bet Anthony doesn't see it that way though.

Here's an interesting site on global warming. http://www.surfacestations.org/

This site is interesting to me, as it backs up something I've thought for some time. That is we are seeing man made changes in the local environment around many of the weather stations.

Weather stations, especially older stations are located often at airports. 75 years ago, airports were called aerodromes. An aerodrome is just a cow field with the cows driven off anytime someone wants to go flying for a bit. So the weather stations were located in big empty grassy fields. These airports have evolved into massive tarmac heat islands. However the data collected today is compared to data collected in the past. The changes we are seeing are more due to local construction activity, and not global trends.

...today "we" have over 7000 stations that measure land temperatures...

Is this maybe relevant to the discussion?

FTA:

Q: What is this project all about?

A: The short answer is; to do a hands on site survey to photograph and document all 1221 USHCN climate stations in the USA. No photographic database of these stations existed, hence the need for this project. See the about page which outlines the goals.

...today "we" have over 7000 stations that measure land temperatures...

Is this maybe relevant to the discussion?

FTA:

Q: What is this project all about?

A: The short answer is; to do a hands on site survey to photograph and document all 1221 USHCN climate stations in the USA. No photographic database of these stations existed, hence the need for this project. See the about page which outlines the goals.

Professor Lindzen is a dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability. His research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity.

He has been a critic of some anthropogenic global warming theories and the political pressures surrounding climate scientists. He wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in April, 2006, in which he wrote: "In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions."