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New Research Further Demonstrates Problems with Surface Temperature Records and Models
From Heartland Daily News
It is not just that the Earth has warmed less than biased temperature measurements indicate, it has also warmed less than climate models have said it should for the amount of CO2 humans have emitted into the atmosphere.
Climate Change Weekly has long detailed the severe problems with surface temperature records, driven largely by the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect compromising the integrity of the vast majority of temperature stations.
In two studies for The Heartland Institute, meteorologist Anthony Watts detailed the extent to which the surface station record in the United States is compromised by station siting that violates the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) own standards for the proper, unbiased, siting of surface stations. Watts’ initial 2009 study found that 89 percent of the surface stations in NOAA’s and the National Weather Service’s (NWS) system were poorly sited and biased. After the study, NOAA/NWS closed some of the most severely compromised, ridiculously sited stations highlighted in report. Indeed, NOAA had already recognized the problem and had prior to the first study’s release established the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), consisting of 137 climate observing stations with the best equipment, existing in stable locations unlikely to ever be compromised by nearby development. At the same time, however, NOAA also added thousands of previously unregulated stations established and maintained by others to its system.
The larger system provides more comprehensive coverage, but the vast majority of the stations are, unsurprisingly, poorly sited. As a result, Watts’ follow up survey of NOAA’s surface station network found 96 percent of the stations used to determine U.S. average temperatures are biased upward due to poor siting. The UHI has compromised them.
How bad is the problem? As explained in an article in The Epoch Times, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that “daytime temperatures in urban areas are 1–7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than temperatures in outlying areas, and nighttime temperatures are about 2–5 degrees Fahrenheit higher.” Whereas the temperature record from the USCRN indicates little or no temperature change during its 18 years of existence, the broader network supports claims that the U.S. is warming. By the way, as detailed in previous Climate Change Weekly posts, what’s true for the United States is also true for the global surface station network and, since 2015, for the ocean temperature measurement system. Both are biased by poor siting compromising the validity of the temperatures measured.
A new report from the Heritage Foundation by Roy Spencer, Ph.D., a long-time friend of The Heartland Institute, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and currently a visiting fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, looks at a slightly different problem with temperatures: the difference between measured warming and climate model temperature projections. It is not just that the Earth has warmed less than biased temperature measurements indicate, it has also warmed less than climate models have said it should for the amount of CO2 humans have emitted into the atmosphere.
Spencer’s research found recent warming is likely not due solely to human greenhouse gas emissions, and the warming experienced is substantially less than climate models have predicted—43 percent less, in fact. And that’s even when readings from the UHI-biased stations are included.
Spencer examined summertime temperature readings for 12 Corn Belt states in the United States. Each of the 36 models he compared to measured warming by surface stations, weather balloons, and global satellites overstated the amount of warming experienced, with most of the models off by 100 percent or more. (See the graphic, below)
Spencer is also working on a large-scale study to explain the discrepancy between urban and rural temperature stations globally, and how that plays into recent claims temperatures are setting all-time records. His preliminary data suggests measured warming is strongly correlated to population density. As cities grow, and populations increase and become more densely packed, temperatures in urban and suburban areas rise faster than in the surrounding countryside, once again confirming Watts’ conclusion that the temperature record is compromised by UHI.
If Watts’ and Spencer’s research are correct, not only do climate models “run too hot,” as even some of their proponents have been forced to admit, but the regularly reported surface station record is running too hot as well.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
The Trump administration will soon push the United Nations (UN) to rewrite the international asylum rules, calling the current framework a “haphazard and chaotic system” routinely abused by bad actors, the Daily Caller News Foundation confirmed.
U.S. officials are planning an event later this month during the UN’s annual General Assembly to spotlight reforms aimed at curbing asylum abuses that have “disrupted entire regions, enriched criminal cartels and violated the sovereignty of nations,” a State Department spokesperson told the DCNF. Proposed changes include requiring migrants to seek protection in the first country they enter rather than “asylum shopping” for a destination of choice.
“The United States plans to begin a conversation on reforming an outdated, decades-old system that has long been abused by bad actors and economic migrants to fuel the global migration crisis,” the spokesperson told the DCNF.
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Most countries, including the U.S., are signatories to UN treaties that set a framework for those fleeing persecution to seek asylum at another country’s borders. The Trump administration, however, plans to push for “commonsense and necessary reforms” emphasizing that every nation has a right to control its borders, there is no right to receive asylum in a country of choice, asylum is meant to be temporary, sovereign states determine when return is possible, and that every country is obligated to accept return of its citizens, the spokesperson said.
European countries that have taken in millions of refugees, many from Muslim-majority nations, have been grappling with social turmoil and violence linked to migrants. Germany alone — with a population of 83 million — had 3 million refugees as of mid-2024, according to the UN.
The push aligns with President Donald Trump’s broader push to tighten asylum standards and “realign” U.S. policy.
“Cities and small towns alike, from Charleroi, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Ohio, to Whitewater, Wisconsin, have seen significant influxes of migrants,” Trump wrote in his Jan. 20 executive order temporarily suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which is currently being challenged in court.
“The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans, that protects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees,” the order continued.
The administration is also expected to set its refugee admission ceiling for fiscal year 2026 this month. More than 100,000 refugees were admitted into the country under former President Joe Biden in fiscal year 2024 — the highest figure since 1994 — according to the Migration Policy Institute.
Meanwhile, Trump has highlighted the violence and discrimination faced by Afrikaners, the minority group of predominantly Dutch descent in South Africa, whose harrowing testimonies the Daily Caller has documented. In May, the president signed an executive order promoting the resettlement of Afrikaners, and several groups have already arrived in the U.S.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright warned International Energy Agency (IEA) head Fatih Birol in July that he was considering cancelling America’s membership in and funding of its activities due to its increasingly political nature.
Specifically, Wright pointed to the agency’s modeling methods used to compile its various reports and projections, which the Secretary and many others believe have trended more into the realm of advocacy than fact-based analysis in recent years.
That trend has long been clear and is a direct result of an intentional shift in the IEA’s mission that evolved in the months during and following the COVID pandemic. In 2022, the agency’s board of governors reinforced this changed mission away from the analysis of real energy-related data and policies to one of producing reports to support and “guide countries as they build net-zero emission energy systems to comply with internationally agreed climate goals” consistent with the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016.
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One step Birol and his team took to incorporate its new role as cheerleader for an energy transition that isn’t actually happening was to eliminate the “current policies” modeling scenario which had long formed the base case for its periodic projections. That sterile analysis of the facts on the ground was replaced it with a more aspirational set of assumptions based on the announced policy intentions of governments around the world. Using this new method based more on hope and dreams than facts on the ground unsurprisingly led the IEA to begin famously predicting a peak in global oil demand by 2029, something no one else sees coming.
Those projections have helped promote the belief among policymakers and investors that a high percentage of current oil company reserves would wind up becoming stranded assets, thus artificially – and many would contend falsely – deflating the value of their company stocks. This unfounded belief has also helped discourage banks from allocating capital to funding exploration for additional oil reserves that the world will almost certainly require in the decades to come.
Secretary Wright, in his role as leading energy policymaker for an administration more focused on dealing with the realities of America’s energy security needs than the fever dreams of the far-left climate alarm lobby, determined that investing millions of taxpayer dollars in IEA’s advocacy efforts each year was a poor use of his department’s budget. So, in an interview with Bloomberg in July, Wright said, “We will do one of two things: we will reform the way the IEA operates, or we will withdraw,” adding that his “strong preference is to reform it.”
Lo and behold, less than two months later, Javier Blas says in a September 10 Bloomberg op/ed headlined “The Myth of Peak Fossil Fuel Demand is Crumbling,” that the IEA will reincorporate its “current policies” scenario in its upcoming annual report. Blas notes that, “the annual report being prepared by the International Energy Agency… shows the alternative — decades more of robust fossil-fuel use, with oil and gas demand growing over the next 25 years — isn’t just possible but probable.”
On his X account, Blas posted a chart showing that, instead of projecting a “peak” of crude oil demand prior to 2030, IEA’s “current policies” scenario will be more in line with recent projections by both OPEC and ExxonMobil showing crude demand continuing to rise through the year 2050 and beyond.
Whether that is a concession to Secretary Wright’s concerns or to simple reality on the ground is not clear. Regardless, it is without question a clear about-face which hopefully signals a return by the IEA to its original mission to serve as a reliable analyst and producer of fact-based information about the global energy situation.
The global community has no shortage of well-funded advocates for the aspirational goals of the climate alarmist community. If this pending return to reality by the IEA in its upcoming annual report signals an end to its efforts to be included among that crowded field, that will be a win for everyone, regardless of the motivations behind it.
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