Global warming data has been faked!

Four years ago, amid a huge cry by Leftists that global warming was gonna kill us all, and soon, a guy by the name of Anthony Watts began taking a critical look at the official government-collected temperature records in the U.S.

Watts had a heavy background in statistics, and he quickly noticed something odd: While weather experts had long known that urban areas were warmer than rural ones, and that within a given metropolitan area the average daily temperature reported by different automated stations would differ by a couple of degrees, Watts noticed that some sites always--always--reported higher temperature than others just a couple of miles away.

Watts knew that normal, "natural" factors accounted for a lot of this : a station near the ocean would be cooler than one farther inland, and so on. But none of the known factors accounted for the differentials Watts was seeing in the temp data.

Moreover, while normal weather variations would cause different locations to read differently, the fact that some stations always showed a higher temp--instead of occasionally also showing a lower temp--suggested to Watts that something was biasing the "hot" sites.

Rather than just blowing it off, Watts visited a few of the "hot" sites, and found that without exception, they were located in artificial "heat islands" such as in the middle of parking lots, the edge of an airport ramp (the aviation term for where the planes are parked), next to an air conditioner condenser coil and so on. One was even located in the middle of a tar-covered roof!

It's long been accepted that such locations give anomalously high readings. In fact the National Weather Service has published criteria telling people to avoid putting temperature measuring stations in such locations. The problem was that measuring stations that had originally been well-sited had gradually been surrounded by buildings, parking lots, air conditioners and the like, and no one had noticed.

Not being a gummint employee, Watts was free to distribute his findings without fear of retaliation. He posted his findings on his blog, along with a list of the exact lat/longitude of every official measuring station in the U.S., and asked readers to visit the ones in their areas, take photos and send 'em to him.

Readers did just that. In droves. And take a wild guess what they found.

Yep--well over half of all temperature-measuring stations in the U.S. were located in artificial heat plumes.

But wait--we're just getting started.

The folks who collected and kept the official temperature records used a computer program to apply "corrections" to each site's readings. In theory these "corrections" might be able to compensate for the artificially hot readings of the badly-sited stations.

Accordingly, Watts asked the keepers of the official data for both the raw temp data and their correction algorithm, which would enable him to determine how the so-called "corrections" were calculated.

The Keepers of the Data (NOAA) told Watts to fuck off.

A less-dedicated investigator might have given up, but Watts was undaunted, and told the Keepers: Your work is funded by the taxpayers, so unless it's officially classified the results should be in the public domain. Show me the raw data and your so-called correction algorithm or I'll see you in court.

The Keepers just laughed, because they were part of the Gummint and had infinite taxpayer-funded resources, while Watts was just some little pissant nobody taxpayer.

So Watts sued under the federal Freedom of Information Act.  And after almost 4 years of legal fencing, he won.

He then went to work cracking both the encoded temperature data and the program that calculated the "correction" factor. And guess what he found?

Instead of the "correcting" program reducing the temps of the badly-sited (i.e. erroneously hot) stations, it was raising the readings of all stations--both the well-sited ones and the anomalously hot ones.

If you're a rational adult this should be shocking--though not all that surprising.

Watts and his associates found that after the government's so-called "correction" was applied, the "adjusted" data showed a warming up to three times greater than the raw data from well-sited rural measuring stations showed.

To see his results is to erase any possibility that this bullshit "correction" was accidental. Click here to go to his blog, scroll down to "Files," click the link next to "Figures for the paper" and look at Figure 4, which shows the raw data alongside the numbers reported by NOAA after the "correction" was applied. It's devastating.

You have to see it to believe it. So here it is:

The aqua bars represent raw (i.e. "real") data, while the red bars are what was reported after the so-called "correction" was applied. Notice that in all but one of the classes, the raw data were adjusted upward.

Congratulations to Watts, his co-authors and all the people who helped him prove that the "official" temperature data held by the government had been "corrected" upward to show far more warming than the very modest amount that's actually present.

Oh, and Watts also sued the British Meteorological Service (may not have that name exactly right) to obtain their raw data and correction algorithm too. When he finally won in court, the gummint munchkins had the brazenness to declare "You're never gonna believe this but just yesterday all that data you wanted suddenly vanished off our drives! We have no idea how it happened. And unfortunately we never bothered to make a back-up copy of this data because all sciency-types like us know that unlike your cheap consumer-grade computers, our expensive government computers never lose stuff."

Hellofa coincidence, eh?

Bottom line: The government has been caught red-handed faking temperature data to make global warming look scary.  Not only were they using data they knew was already hot-biased, they applied a totally bogus "correction factor" that increased almost ALL temperature readings from the raw data.  Finally, they refused to release the algorithm that would reveal their fraud until forced to do so by a lawsuit brought by a private citizen.

This is outright fraud, and by rights everyone in NOAA who was remotely involved should be fired immediately. The folks directly responsible should be prosecuted.

Unfortunately--but again not surprisingly--the lying mainstream media will ignore this since it doesn't help their party. They'll claim the story is just too complex for most of their readers to follow, so they'll ignore it until they can switch to Defense-2, which is that "it's old news."

Did you find the above story too complex to follow? I didn't think so.