The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) once famously said, "People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts." I remember very well Moynihan when he was in the Senate; I didn't often agree with him on policy issues, but he was an intelligent man who commanded some respect; and in this famous statement, he was absolutely right. Facts are stubborn things, and we are forced to live within a framework of facts. But all too often, dogma is pushed to take precedence over facts, and that's a recipe for bad policy.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ongoing climate change discussion. Now, a new study by German engineer and scientist Moritz Büsing has shown some serious flaws in the methods of measuring temperatures, and the release of this work will no doubt draw fire from climate scolds in Germany, the rest of Europe - and the United States.
But facts are stubborn things.
According to a new study, weather station data has been shown to non-climatically and erroneously record warmer-than-actual temperatures due to the steady and perpetual aging process almost universally observed in temperature gauges.
When a weather station temperature gauge’s white paint or white plastic ages and darkens, this allows more solar radiation to be absorbed by the gauge than when the gauge is bright white and new. Within a span of just 2 to 5 years, a gauge has been observed to record maximum temperatures 0.46°C to 0.49°C warmer than in gauges that have not undergone an aging process. This artificial warming is not corrected in modern data sets, and it builds up over time – even when the gauges are cleaned or resurfaced every few years.
If these systematic artificial warming errors were to be corrected rather than ignored, the 140-year (1880-’90 to 2010-’20) GISTEMP global warming trend plummets from the current estimate of +1.43°C down to +0.83°C, a 42% differential. The temperature reduction can be even more pronounced – from +1.43°C down to +0.41°C – if a set of conservative assumptions (described in detail in the paper) are removed.
This isn't the first case where the methods of measuring temperatures over time have been flawed.
See Related: Global Warming or Global Incompetence? Study on Locations of Temp-Monitoring Stations Is Revealing.
Of course, facts like these, when taken in aggregate, poke a lot of holes in the entire climate panic agenda. The fact is (and I know I keep saying this, but it bears repeating) that the earth's climate is an impossibly huge, chaotic system that beggars human understanding. Through most of this planet's 4.6 billion-year history, it's been warmer than it is now, and only a few thousand years ago an ice sheet a mile thick covered vast areas of North America, Europe, and Asia. Massive events that take place over vast sweeps of time can make great changes in the planet's climate, such as the closing of the ancient Tethys Ocean, the separation of Australia and Antarctica, the "docking" of North and South America, and the slamming of the Indian subcontinent into Asia that raised the Himalayas. All of these things had serious impacts on the Earth's climate - and all of those things make us modern humans, with our brief history on the planet, seem pretty tiny.
But that doesn't matter to the climate scolds; it is political power, not science, that motivates them.
See Related: Were the CBS Moderators Instructed to Affirm Climate Alarmist Talking Points?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Gets Schooled Over Her Remarks on Climate Change, Hurricanes
The linked article concludes:
...temperature data can homogenized, or adjusted, to exhibit just about any trend or non-trend the creator of the chart intends to. Data can be bent and manipulated to show strong warming, weak warming, or even no warming over the last 140 years.
Perhaps the modern version of global warming is not nearly as unprecedented or even unusual as it is purported to be.
The data can be bent and manipulated, yes; but the problem isn't that it's being bent and manipulated in and of itself. The problem is that the manipulation is being done by bad actors seeking political power and to reduce or eliminate our modern, high-tech lifestyle.
Not for the activists, of course. Only for the rest of us. The worst offenders are, of course, the elites who buzz off to climate conferences in their private jets, then fly those carbon-spewing airplanes back to wag their fingers and lecture the rest of us on our carbon footprints - while basing their arguments on data that daily looks to be more and more flawed.
You can see the complete study, which has passed peer review and been published in the Journal "Science of Climate Change," here.
