From Mark Landsbaum
Before we shell out as much as $1 trillion a year to “solve” the problem of global warming, which is the estimated cost of pending Senate legislation to meet emission reduction targets by 2050, it might be a good idea to revisit the basis for such rash and irreversible spending (no one’s going to refund your money once you hand over the dough).
Let’s take just one teeny aspect of this alarming warming warning so casually tossed around by those who want you to pony up the big bucks: temperatures.
After all, the whole basis for global warming alarmism is that temperatures have risen dramatically and therefore are expected to increase even more dramatically. Well, temperatures have risen about a degree, give or take a small fraction, over the past century, they say.
Let’s examine how they even know such a thing:
“Historical temperature records taken near the surface of the Earth are subject to various biases and recording errors that render them incorrect,” observes John McLean of the Science & Public Policy Institute. “In the early days thermometers could only show the temperature at the moment of reading and so the data recorded from that time was for just one reading each day. Later the thermometers were able to record the minimum and maximum temperatures, and so the daily readings were those extremes in the 24 hour period. Only in the last 20 or 30 years have instruments been available that record the temperature at regular intervals throughout the 24 hours, thus allowing a true time-based daily average to be calculated.”
It would seem comparisons of reasonably recent temperatures with those of even a few decades earlier might be more apples to oranges than apples to apples, no? Then there’s this:
“The so-called ‘average’ temperatures both published and frequently plotted through time are initially based on only a single daily value, then later on the mathematical average of the minimum and maximum temperatures. Although time-based averages are now available for some regions they are not generally used because the better instrumentation is not uniformly installed throughout the world and the historical data is at best a mathematical average of two values. The problem is that these averages are easily distorted by brief periods of high or low temperatures relative to the rest of the day, such as a brief period with less cloud cover or a short period of cold wind or rain.”
Oops. Apples to oranges might be too kind. More like apples to door knobs. But there’s more:
“Another serious problem is that thermometers are often located where human activity can directly influence the local temperature. This is not only the urban heat island (UHI) effect, where heat generated by traffic, industry and private homes and then trapped by the man-made physical environment causes elevated temperatures. There is also a land use effect, where human activity has modified the microclimate of the local environment through buildings or changes such as land clearing or agriculture. Only recently have the climatic impacts of these human changes started to receive detailed scrutiny, but many older meteorological records are inescapably contaminated by them.”
Are you starting to see a problem here? It gets worse. Much worse. But let us end this little peek behind the global warming wizards’ curtain with this:
“The integrity of some important historical data is also undermined by reports that various Chinese weather stations that were claimed to be in unchanged locations from 1954 to 1983 had in fact moved, with one station moving 5 times and up to 41 kilometres. The extent of this problem on a global scale is unknown but worrying, because shifts of less than 500 metres are known to cause a significant change in recordings.”
As we’ve said many times before, if your auto mechanic based his diagnosis on such shaky science you wouldn’t let him lift the hood of your Prius. But you’re willing to cough up $1 trillion a year for 40 years based on this?
