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Bad News for Climate Change Deniers

Although the preponderance of evidence clearly points to warming global temperatures in recent years, there are those who prefer not to accept the evidence. One thread that got a lot of coverage during the past few years was the claim that poor siting of weather stations used to acquire long term temperature data had biased the trend towards an imaginary increase in average temperatures.

It turns out that the deniers had a valid point about the siting of the measurement equipment. Quite a few stations were “poorly sited” – too close to buildings, near vents, next to parking lots, etc. All of these factors could throw off measurements and create faulty data.

So, were the deniers correct that the evidence of warming from these stations was the result of poor siting?

It turns out that they had it exactly backwards. Careful studies comparing the results from the poorly sited stations to the results from properly sited stations show that the poorly sited stations were actually biased to produce incorrectly COOLER readings than the correctly sited stations. To state it another way, the deniers were correct in noting that measurement sites were not optimally placed but when the biases from incorrect sites are accounted for it turns out that the rising temperature trend is confirmed… and perhaps slightly more significant than scientists first believed.

Not that any of this will given the deniers a moments pause…

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January 25, 2010 - Posted by | Commentary, Environment | , , , , , ,

1 Comment

  1. I think it is something of a religion for the climate change deniers. They hate Al Gore and anything and everything he stands for regardless of whether he is right about it or not. The science doesn't belong to Al Gore. He didn't do the research. Scientists did the research and found the problem. Al Gore just accepted their findings. And I accept their findings. I think it has long been established scientific fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and we have been pumping a lot of it into the atmosphere for a long time. And the record is there that shows the earth is warming and that the warming coincides with the increase on atmospheric CO2. But it seems to me that if the deniers are going to prove their point, then they are going to have to identify exactly what mechanism is causing the earth to warm, rather than claim our CO2 pollution can't possibly be doing it while they make fun of Al Gore. But when I ask some of these people what that mechanism is, all I get is silence. It's sad and we are all going to suffer for it.

    Comment by Cynthia | February 1, 2010


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