More on NCDC Temperature Data “Adjustments”, Reports SPPI

The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) has released another paper examining the surface temperature data adjustments by U.S. Government-funded scientists. 

Both the Goddard Institute for Space Science (GISS), the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC),  have come under increasing scrutiny and criticism for their station selections and the protocols used for adjusting raw data.  The outcome of the on-going tampering with raw data is the appearance of significant warming in the contiguous 48 States.

Writing in Contiguous U.S. Temperature Trends Using NCDC Raw and Adjusted Data for One-Per-State Rural and Urban Station Sets, Dr. Edward Long states, “The problem would seem to be the methodologies engendered in treatment for a mix of urban and rural locations; that the ‘adjustment’ protocol appears to accent to a warming effect rather than eliminate it.  This, if correct, leaves serious doubt for whether the rate of increase in temperature found from the adjusted data is due to natural warming trends or warming because of another reason, such as erroneous consideration of the effects of urban warming.”

Dr. Long observed that the government’s ‘adjustments’ eradicated the difference between rural and urban environments, thus hiding urban heating.  The consequence, reports Long, “is a five-fold increase in the rural temperature rate of increase and a slight decrease in the rate of increase of the urban temperature.”  What Long found so striking was the magnitude of the changes that had to be made to the raw rural data in order to arrive at its adjusted values. 

The analysis of the government’s data tampering concludes that NCDC “has taken liberty to alter the actual rural measured values.  Thus the adjusted rural values are a systematic increase from the raw values, more and more back into time and a decrease for the more current years.  At the same time the urban temperatures were little, or not, adjusted from their raw values.  The results is an implication of warming that has not occurred in nature, but indeed has occurred in urban surroundings as people gathered more into cities and cities grew in size and became more industrial in nature.  So, in recognizing this aspect, one has to say there has been warming due to man, but it is an urban warming.  The temperatures due to nature itself, at least within the Contiguous U. S., have increased at a non-significant rate and do not appear to have any correspondence to the presence or lack of presence of carbon dioxide

“In layman terms”, says SPPI President Robert Ferguson, “the federal government, through its funded agents, may be manipulating surface temperature data and historical records in pray to government-advocated public policy.”

Similar concerns have been raised by Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts:  Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? (http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/policy_driven_deception.html)

The full paper may be found here;  http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/temperature_trends.html

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