Environment
Official Temperature Data Aren’t ‘Data’ and Shouldn’t Be Used to Restrict Freedom
From Heartland Daily News
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seeming to confirm NOAA’s manipulated ocean claims, had to be corrected for overstating ocean warming or risk being withdrawn from publication.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.
Economy
Canada should not want to lead the world on climate change policy
From the Fraser Institute
Some commentators in the media want the the federal Conservatives to take a leadership position on climate, and by extension make Canada a world leader on the journey to the low-carbon uplands of the future. This would be a mistake for three reasons.
First, unlike other areas such as trade, defence or central banking, where diplomats aim for realistic solutions to identifiable problems, in the global climate policy world one’s bona fides are not established by actions but by willingness to recite the words of an increasingly absurd creed. Take, for example, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres’ fanatical rhetoric about the “global boiling crisis” and his call for a “death knell” for fossil fuels “before they destroy our planet.” In that world no credit is given for actually reducing emissions unless you first declare that climate change is an existential crisis, that we are (again, to quote Guterres) at the “tip of a tipping point” of “climate breakdown” and that “humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.” Any attempt to speak sensibly on the issue is condemned as denialism, whereas any amount of hypocrisy from jet-setting politicians, global bureaucrats and celebrities is readily forgiven as long as they parrot the deranged climate crisis lingo.
The opposite is also true. Unwillingness to state absurdities means actual accomplishments count for nothing. Compare President Donald Trump, who pulled out of the Paris treaty and disparaged climate change as unimportant, to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who embraced climate emergency rhetoric and dispatched ever-larger Canadian delegations to the annual greenhouse gabfests. In the climate policy world, that made Canada a hero and the United States a villain. Meanwhile, thanks in part to expansion of natural gas supplies under the Trump administration, from 2015 to 2019 U.S. energy-based CO2 emissions fell by 3 per cent even as primary energy consumption grew by 3 per cent. In Canada over the same period, CO2 emissions fell only 1 per cent despite energy consumption not increasing at all. But for the purpose of naming heroes and villains, no one cared about the outcome, only the verbiage. Likewise, climate zealots will not credit Conservatives for anything they achieve on the climate file unless they are first willing to repeat untrue alarmist nonsense, and probably not even then.
On climate change, Conservatives should resolve to speak sensibly and use mainstream science and economic analysis, but that means rejecting climate crisis rhetoric and costly “net zero” aspirations. Which leads to the second problem—climate advocates love to talk about “solutions” but their track record is 40 years of costly failure and massive waste. Here again leadership status is tied to one’s willingness to dump ever-larger amounts of taxpayer money into impractical schemes loaded with all the fashionable buzzwords. The story is always the same. We need to hurry and embrace this exciting economic opportunity, which for some reason the private sector won’t touch.
There are genuine benefits to pursuing practical sensible improvements in the way we make and use fossil fuels. But the current and foreseeable state of energy technology means CO2 mitigation steps will be smaller and much slower than was the case for other energy side-effects such as acid rain and particulates. It has nothing to do with lack of “political will;” it’s an unavoidable consequence of the underlying science, engineering and economics. In this context, leadership means being willing sometimes to do nothing when all the available options yield negative net benefits.
That leads to the third problem—opportunity cost. Aspiring to “climate leadership” means not fixing any of the pressing economic problems we currently face. Climate policy over the past four decades has proven to be very expensive, economically damaging and environmentally futile. The migration of energy-intensive industry to China and India is a very real phenomenon and more than offsets the tiny emission-reduction measures Canada and other western countries pursued under the Kyoto Protocol.
The next government should start by creating a new super-ministry of Energy, Resources and Climate where long-term thinking and planning can occur in a collaborative setting, not the current one where climate policy is positioned at odds with—and antagonistic towards—everything else. The environment ministry can then return its focus to air and water pollution management, species and habitat conservation, meteorological services and other traditional environmental functions. The climate team should prepare another national assessment but this time provide much more historical data to help Canadians understand long-term observed patterns of temperature and precipitation rather than focusing so much on model simulations of the distant future under implausible emission scenarios.
The government should also move to extinguish “climate liability,” a legal hook on which dozens of costly nuisance lawsuits are proliferating here and elsewhere. Canada should also use its influence in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to reverse the mission creep, clean out the policy advocacy crowd and get the focus back on core scientific assessments. And we should lead a push to move the annual “COPs”—Conferences of the Parties to the Rio treaty—to an online format, an initiative that would ground enough jumbo jets each year to delay the melting of the ice caps at least a century.
Finally, the new Ministry of Energy, Resources and Climate should work with the provinces to find one region or municipality willing to be a demonstration project on the feasibility of relying only on renewables for electricity. We keep hearing from enthusiasts that wind and solar are the cheapest and best options, while critics point to their intermittency and hidden costs. Surely there must be one town in Canada where the councillors, fresh from declaring a climate crisis and buying electric buses, would welcome the chance to, as it were, show leadership. We could fit them out with all the windmills and solar panels they want, then disconnect them from the grid and see how it goes. And if upon further reflection no one is willing to try it, that would also be useful information.
In the meantime, the federal Conservatives should aim merely to do some sensible things that yield tangible improvements on greenhouse gas emissions without wrecking the economy. Maybe one day that will be seen as real leadership.
Author:
Economy
Federal government’s environmental policies will do more harm than good
From the Fraser Institute
By Matthew Lau
The study covered grocery bags, food packaging, soft drink containers, furniture, t-shirts and other plastic products. In most cases, replacing plastics with alternatives causes greenhouse gas emissions to rise by 35 to 700 per cent.
Through a variety of regulatory and spending initiatives, the Trudeau government is expanding its control over our lives, often in the name of climate change or other environmental objectives. For example, the government plans to force consumers to buy electric vehicles instead of conventional cars and has proposed or implemented plastics restrictions on consumers and businesses—everything from plastic drinking straws and plastic utensils to clothing material and food packages.
However, while evidence of the high costs to consumers continues to mount, evidence of the environmental benefits is notably absent. Indeed, many recent studies provide evidence that Ottawa’s restrictions on consumers may well cause net environmental harm. One reason is that the plastic products the federal government is so intent on restricting are more environmentally efficient than alternatives.
A study published earlier this year in the journal Environmental Science & Technology concludes, “15 of the 16 applications a plastic product incurs fewer greenhouse gas emissions than their alternatives.” The study covered grocery bags, food packaging, soft drink containers, furniture, t-shirts and other plastic products. In most cases, replacing plastics with alternatives causes greenhouse gas emissions to rise by 35 to 700 per cent.
Why? Because plastic generally takes less energy to manufacture and transport than the alternatives. In fact, many plastic products that are more environmentally friendly than non-plastic alternatives (according to the study) are products the Trudeau government wants to ban or curtail through regulation.
Other evidence shows plastic bans of the type imposed in Canada cause environmental ruin, contrary to the predictions of politicians. For example, research in New Jersey found after single-use plastic bags were banned in 2022, shoppers switched to the heavier reusable bags. “Owing to the larger carbon footprint of the heavier, non-woven polypropylene bags,” reported the Wall Street Journal, “greenhouse gas emissions rose 500%.”
Similarly, the New York Times reported that while California banned single-use plastic bags almost a decade ago, in 2023 “Californians threw away more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed, according to figures from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.”
Also from the Wall Street Journal, analyses suggest electric vehicles often emit more particulate pollution (dust, dirt and soot) than conventional vehicles. That’s because most particulate pollution these days is not from the tailpipe but from tire wear. EVs are much heavier than conventional vehicles so their tires wear out faster, increasing particulate pollution. The firm Emissions Analytics compared a plug-in electric to a hybrid vehicle and found the plug-in electric, which weighed more, emitted about one-quarter more particulate matter than the hybrid as a result of tire wear.
Last year, the chair of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board noted that EVs manufactured by Ford, Volvo and Toyota were all about 33 per cent heavier than conventionally powered versions of those same vehicles. That’s a problem not only for the environment but also for driver safety—and yet more evidence that the Trudeau government’s EV mandates will harm Canadians.
When it comes to vehicles, plastic products and many other things, the Trudeau government should begin reducing its control over consumers. The harm to consumers is evident; the compensating benefits to the environment—if any—are not.
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