Guy discovers that most temperature measuring sites were reading too high. NOAA: "Go away"

Anthony Watts runs a website that studies climate.  According to NOAA and NASA he's a "dangerous extremist," meaning he doesn't buy the utter crap about the Earth warming to an unusual extent, or that dangerous warming is caused by CO2 emitted by human activity.

Watts plays a key role in the story below.

About 20 years ago scientists were starting to suspect something country folks had known for decades: that cities are always hotter than the countryside.  All the pavement and brick and stone buildings store heat during the day, making city temps about 5 F warmer than the countryside.

Watts and others realized that since a large fraction of weather stations were in cities, the higher readings they were recording could easily be used to support Global Warmies.  Academics then started debating this.

Then about 14 years ago Watts happened to visit his local airport and noticed a white box with louvers, which he recognized as a temperature measuring station.  But the box was totally surrounded by concrete (a heat reservoir), and was also in the exhaust of a large air conditioning condenser (heat source).

Watts brought this to the attention of the (government) staff at the weather station.  I know you'll be shocked to hear that they shrugged off his information, in essence saying "It's always been like that."  But of course it hadn't, as old photos proved.

Watts then guessed that this site was unlikely to be the only one poorly sited: over decades, lots of other temperature-measuring sites that were originally in grassy fields had likely been surrounded by buildings and air conditioner condensers and aircraft parking ramps.  If true, the measurements could easily account for all the "scary" official temperature increase the warmies claimed had happened over the past century.

So Watts used his website to ask his readers around the U.S. to help.  He published the location of every official temperature station in the U.S. and asked people near one to take pics of the box from various angles.

The pics showed that 90% of USHCN stations were sited in violation of NOAA / NWS published standards for thermometer placement, meaning they were likely reporting inaccurately high temperatures.

In March of 2009 he published his results on his site, under the title "Is the U.S. temperature record reliable?" and included pics of the most poorly-sited boxes.  People didn't need a PhD to instantly understand that the gruberment was once again being either incompetent or conning 'em.

NOAA responded by putting a page on its website titled "Talking Points related to 'Is the U.S. temperature record reliable?"  It's shown below.  Here's the key 'graf:
>>In the U.S. Historical Climatology Network, a dataset used for climate change analysis in the observing system such as changes in instrumentation or location of the instrument shelter, the analysis found no indication of a bias caused by poor station siting.>>

That's a brazen lie.  The analysis DID find a bias: NOAA claimed they were measuring the "real" temperature--but it was 5 degrees hotter than the temp outside the cities.  So a tiny fraction of the planet's surface--cities--was anomalously warm, due to heat-storing surfaces and heat-emitting activities in cities.

NOAA's line about "changes in instrumentation or location of the instrument shelter" was a mis-direction: presumably whatever device they used measured accurate temperatures for that spot.  And Watts didn't claim the "instrument shelters" had been moved.  In fact the problem was that when an air conditioner was installed within ten feet or so, no one even noticed that this might make the readings higher than the temperature 100 feet away.

The poor siting of 90% of the official thermometers was easy to prove, and easy for people to understand.  The siting violated the published guidelines--but this was ignored by NOAA.  You may well wonder why.

• NOAA and NCEI admit changing measured temperature data.  They just call it "adjustments."  These "adjustments" by NOAA, NASA and NCEI to *measured* temperature data are almost always upward for recent temps, meaning "official" recent temperatures are now higher than actually measured at the time.  But older records are almost always adjusted *down* to make the "official" temperatures of decades ago appear cooler.

You may well wonder what the reasoning is behind these unusual changes to the official record, and the fact that they're almost always upward for recent years and downward for decades ago, eh?

NOAA expert: "Of course, you stupid deplorable.  See, up through the 1950's mercury thermometers were inaccurate, always reading a degree or so high.  Once scientists discovered that, we replaced all those old thermometers with the new, improve "Mark 3" version.  But then in 1970 we discovered that contamination of the mercury due to global warming was causing the Mark 3s to read a degree or so too low.
   "We'd show you the data that prove this, but unfortunately the computer tape was accidentally erased, and we found that the backup had failed.  So you'll just have to take our word for it!"
   "But real scientists, like Doctor Anthony Fauci, published several papers on this.  If you can't find 'em you just must not be using the right search terms, so it's not our fault.  No, we won't give you a link.  If you're so smart, do your own research."