Tuesday, August 18, 2009

It's the Thermometers, Stupid!

I’ve been following the work of E.M. Smith looking at how the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) calculates their “global” temperature anomaly, which is oft quoted by alarmists everywhere as “evidence” of global warming. Up to now, E.M. Smith has concentrated on the interesting things GISS does with their ramshackle code. Recently he’s taken a step back in one of those “wait a minute” moments one gets when something strange simply pops out. He took a look at the data.

One of the things that popped out for him was that virtually all the warming signal of the past 30+ years occurs in the winter months. The summer months don’t show any significant warming signal. We wonder why this is so. Should not the "unprecedented and dramatic" rise in temperatures caused by the trace gas CO2 occur across all seasons, if indeed CO2 is the culprit? Could it be that more thermometers have moved to the tropics? Would not a change in where we are measuring temperatures have an impact on the average?

At first E.M. was going to put off delving deeper, but ultimately curiosity overcame him. Guess what he found? There was an increase in thermometers in the tropics and a decrease in the northern latitudes during the entire “Modern Warming Period.” Gee, what could that do to our global temperature average? Could it possibly be that if we measure more temperatures in warm places and fewer in colder places that the average will go up? It’s the thermometers, stupid!

So, quite apart from lack of evidence for the anthropogenic cause of global warming, we now can demonstrate, with the data, significant doubt that there is significant warming at all. So far no one has discovered any methodology in GISSTemp that accounts for Tropic Heat Island (THI) effect. Not that their method for Urban Heat Island (UHI) is very good either.

Read the details of E.M. Smith's discovery here.