Still not seeing anything resembling evidence. Just a lot of supposition and a willful ignorance of the stated reasons for such a change.
It kind of reminds me of the way the GOP howled at Nate Silver for his methods of analyzing poll data. Sure, one poll is accurate for its specific moment, but its biases and system of data collection do not necessarily represent the most accurate picture. Sure, Pa Walton recorded a 72 degree day in June of 1935. But because other measurements were taken in inconsistent locations, or with inconsistent methods, or at inconsistent intervals, there is an inherent bias introduced into overall data set. The newer models are a way to more accurately remove those biases.
Although, I'm not surprised that there's yet another gturner post that categorically ignores or denies scientific data and methods.
Well, perhaps a few great grandparents were too dumb to read a thermometer to within 5 degrees, but obviously not
everyone was or we can just throw out
all climate and temperature records.
Oddly enough, one of the world authorities on surface temperature measurement is the world's most prominent skeptic, Anthony Watts, who conducted a massive surface station project that forced the NCDC and NOAA to remove a huge number of reporting stations from the data set.
Anthony's project started by looking at the errors in the Stevenson screen, since as a graduate student he almost painted one with modern latex paint, which would destroy the consistency of the measurement instrument.
As it turns out, all the weather stations have a consistent, false, positive bias over time as the white wash ages, and as dust, dirt, and in some cases lichens accumulate on the screen. They also very, very slowly sink into the soil, moving them into the warmer air closer to the ground, but that's a very minor bias except in extreme deserts. Over time the station tends to accumulate accessories and upgrades, like a well-worn walking path, large decorative rocks, a nearby parking lot, and attached building, and the outside unit of a central air-conditioning system for the attached building.
All these create a false positive bias, and when they get corrected, by washing the Stevenson screen, repainting it, moving the decorative rocks, or moving it 50 feet further out in the yard to build a patio, there's an abrubt
return to the initial conditions. What the NCDC has done is use a computer program to retain the false rising slope and ignore all the returns to the initial conditions. In essence, they're claiming that the grass in your yard is five feet high because they regard the abrupt drop in grass height from mowing as anomalous and stitch together the positive trend in grass heights to reach a final number.
To anyone with even a basic competence in science, it's obvious that you can't do things like that and still have a data set that has any physical meaning. The graph is prettier, it's smother (and more ominous), but it's also utter fiction. They've replaced a recorded measurement with a number that was conjured out of air to satisfy someone's artistic sensibilities or political motives.
If real science allowed that kind of thing, we'd still be insisting that projectiles travel in straight lines as Aristotle taught us, once you perform enough corrections to the raw data, and particle physics would be a mess because observations would be rejected in favor of opinions on where particles
should have appeared.
