I spent many years as an independent corporate consultant, and most of what I was paid to do for my clients was to teach them things like root cause analysis and failure investigation processes; they also learned how to gather data from a wide variety of processes and procedures, and analyze it for various trends. I used to describe this as "extracting information from data." The first step in this is, of course gathering data.
In any field of endeavor where one is gathering data, like, say, temperature, it's important to first determine if your measurements will be valid. If you are measuring the temperature inside an oven used for curing ceramics, you would not place your thermocouples in the lunch room. That wouldn't make any sense.
Nor does it make sense to place temperature-monitoring stations gathering data to prove global climate change, say, within a few feet of a tarmac on which jet airliners taxi for takeoff. But the United Kingdom's Met Office seems to have done just that. At the Daily Sceptic, Environment Editor Chris Morrison has brought photos.
These days the Met Office has rebadged its daily “high” temperatures as “extreme”, all the better of course to ramp up fears of heat as part of the Net Zero education process. Last Wednesday’s “extreme” of 20.4°C was recorded at Teddington Bushy Park. As the Google Earth photo below shows, the “extreme” temperature is helped on its way by an adjacent high wall reflecting heat onto the measuring device and a large housing development warming the nearby area. Teddington Bushy Park is a junk class 4 station with internationally-recognised “uncertainties” of 2°C. Joke class 4 station might be a more apt description. How anyone can think information taken at this site is suitable for scientific work that ultimately produces a global mean temperature is a mystery.
It is a mystery, unless, of course, you contemplate the idea that it may well be deliberate. I'm generally more inclined to accept incompetence rather than malice, but there sure seems to be a pattern here.
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Let's look at the locations that Mr. Morrison presents to us in the piece linked above.
The first location, as he mentioned, is within feet of a taxiway at a major airport - which airport isn't clear. Not only does that tarmac gather and retain heat - but the temperature station is placed where it is passed, several times an hour at minimum, by giant airliners spewing hot jet engine exhaust. There is also all the other pavement in the area, which is retaining heat not only from the sun but also from the aforementioned jets.
The second photo appears to be a little better; it shows the station on the edge of some woods. But across a small open space is a huge brick apartment building, which would reflect sunshine and heat right onto that station.
The third and final photo shows that it's not just the UK Met Office screwing this up, as this last photo is from Florida and was placed by NOAA. The station stands on some grass. Sounds fine, right? Except the monitor is a few feet away from a bank of external air-conditioning units. In case you're not familiar with these big, air-conditioning units (they are notably scarce in Alaska, for obvious reasons), they work by using the expansion of pressurized gas to cool air - but entropy being what it is, the external units that pressurize said gas generate a lot of waste heat, which is discharged outdoors - in this case, directly at the temperature station.
One American meteorologist, Anthony Watts, has spent a lot of time analyzing the effects of all this:
All of these figures are collected and then adjusted and the “bottom line” is that the data have been changed to increase the warming trend. A number of attempts have been made to estimate the changes caused by numerous corruptions. “We have about 50% less global warming than the media and activists would have you believe”, Watts suggests.
The conclusion? Fraud. And it's being perpetrated, I remind you, by the very people who are beating the drum of "climate change" to advocate for the destruction of our modern, technological lifestyles. This misplacement of temperature-monitoring stations constitutes a vicious fraud on a global scale; it's too widespread and too pernicious to write off as simple incompetence.
Fortunately, now, the truth is coming out. The Met Office and NOAA have been fudging their data-gathering; their techniques are faulty, the information they are extracting is fallacious, and their conclusions, to put it bluntly, are crap.
