Newspapers TV Networks canada.

com home

7°C
Overcast
Detailed Forecast

Quick links: ShopLocal, Obituaries, Horoscope, Lotteries

Division of Canwest Publishing Inc.

Home News Opinion Business Sports Entertainment Life Health Technology Travel Jobs Cars Homes Classifieds

Scientists using selective temperature data, skeptics RELATED TOPICS

say National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration
BY RICHARD FOOT, CANWEST NEWS SERVICE JANUARY 21, 2010 COMMENTS (3)
Climatology

Earth Science
STORY PHOTOS ( 1 )

MOST POPULAR NEWS

MOST READ E-MAILED COMMENTED

Snow flies at Cypress Mountain, but 2010

Olympic venue still mired in mud

City of Richmond to investigate status of Lulu

Island Winery

Canuck notebook: Canucks send message to

CBC with silence

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie split: reports

Vancouver police make a break in child sex

assault cases

Wal-Mart commercial an instant hit online

more »

A weather research laboratory located on Ellesmere Island at Eureka, Nunavut. BREAKING NEWS ALERTS
Photograph by: James R. Drummond/Dalhousie University/Handout,
Sign up to receive e-mail alerts on breaking news
from The Vancouver Sun.

you@canada.com
Call it the mystery of the missing thermometers.

Our Privacy Statement

Two months after “climategate” cast doubt on some of the science behind global warming, new
questions are being raised about the reliability of a key temperature database, used by the
To view this site, you need to have Flash Player 8.0
United Nations and climate change scientists as proof of recent planetary warming. or later installed. Click here to get the latest Flash
player.

Two American researchers allege that U.S. government scientists have skewed global
temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the
world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada.

In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a
global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.

Worse, only one station -- at Eureka on Ellesmere Island -- is now used by NOAA as a
temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.

The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the
country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada.

Yet as American researchers Joseph D’Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer
programmer, point out in a study published on the website of the Science and Public Policy
Institute, NOAA uses “just one thermometer [for measuring] everything north of latitude 65
degrees.” 

Both the authors, and the institute, are well-known in climate-change circles for their skepticism
about the threat of global warming.
Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for
Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in
the database, but have “cherry picked” the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively
warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea -
- which has a warming effect on winter weather.

Over the past two decades, they say, “the percentage of [Canadian] stations in the lower
elevations tripled and those at higher elevations, above 300 feet, were reduced in half.”

Using the agency’s own figures, Smith shows that in 1991, almost a quarter of NOAA’s
Canadian temperature data came from stations in the high Arctic. The same region contributes
only 3% of the Canadian data today.

Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and GISS also ignore data from numerous weather
stations in other parts of the world, including Russia, the U.S. and China.

They say NOAA collects no temperature data at all from Bolivia -- a high-altitude, landlocked
country -- but instead “interpolates” or assigns temperature values for that country based on
data from “nearby” temperature stations located at lower elevations in Peru, or in the Amazon
basin.

The result, they say, is a warmer-than-truthful global temperature record.

“NOAA . . . systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias towards
removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be
cooler,” the authors say. “The thermometers in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea,
and to airport tarmacs.”

The NOAA database forms the basis of the influential climate modelling work, and the dire,
periodic warnings on climate change, issued by James Hanson, the director of the GISS in New
York.

Neither agency responded to a request for comment Wednesday from Canwest News Service.
However Hanson did issue a public statement on the matter earlier this week.

“NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global
temperature analysis,” he said. “The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands
by previous scientifically-based conclusions regarding global temperatures.”

In addition to the allegations against NOAA and GISS, climate scientists are also dealing with
the embarrassment this week of the false glacier-melt warning contained in the 2007 report of
the UN Panel on Climate Change. That report said Himalayan glaciers are likely to disappear
within three decades if current rates of melting continue.

This week, however, the panel admitted there is no scientific evidence to support such a claim.

The revelations come only two months after the “climategate” scandal, in which the leak or
theft of thousands of e-mails -- private discussions between scientists in the U.S. and Britain --
showed that a group of influential climatologists tried for years to manipulate global warming
data, rig the scientific peer-review process and keep their methods secret from other,
contrary-minded researchers.

© Copyright (c) National Post

 

E-mail this Article Print this Article Share this Article

MORE ON THIS STORY

Lorne Gunter:
Glacier claim
another blow for
climate science
Peter Foster:
Climate change
meltdown
UN panel 'regrets'
exaggeration of
Himalayan thaw
UN climate report:
Scientist warned
glacier forecast
 was wrong

STORY TOOLS
E-mail this Article

Print this Article

Comments (3)

Share this Article

Font:

RELATED STORIES
FROM AROUND THE
WEB

Environmental
innovators who lead
the race
Yorkshire Post, UK
Monday, January 25,
2010

Religious images?
BBC News
Monday, January 25,
2010

Review: US agency
must revamp fish law
enforcement
factsaboutclimatechange.com
Monday, January 25,
2010

YOUR COMMENTS

snowmaneasy
January 22, 2010 - 12:42 PM Flag this as Inappropriate

 
As we speak the following announcement (Session 2009-10

22 January 2010)  has just been made today in the UK......I have included the link below;

THE DISCLOSURE OF CLIMATE DATA FROM THE CLIMATIC RESEARCH UNIT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF EAST
ANGLIA

The Science and Technology Committee (UK) today announces an inquiry into the unauthorised publication of
data, emails and documents relating to the work of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East
Anglia (UEA). The Committee has agreed to examine and invite written submissions on three questions:

— What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?

— Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA
adequate (see below)?

— How independent are the other two international data sets?

The Committee intends to hold an oral evidence session in March 2010.

www.parliament.uk/.../s_t_pn14_100122.cfm

   

snowmaneasy
January 22, 2010 - 9:33 AM Flag this as Inappropriate

 
There may be something in this story...as I have been checking the temp data for Smithers, Central BC..I have
plotted all the data back to 1949...you can check it yourself on the Environment Canada website...just go to the
archives  for BC and then for Smithers and download the data into excel....as for all of these issues you have to 
check it yourself.

Well, I plotted it all in excel and lo and behold no warming can be seen after 1998. In fact from 1998 to the end of
2009 there is in fact a decline (cooling)

   

Brianpeter
 January 22, 2010 - 7:25 AM Flag this as Inappropriate

 
If any person knows how to forward this article to the worlds biggest ding bat AL GORE would you do the world a
favor and send it to him;

Thank you in advance

   

all »

ADD YOUR COMMENTS

Keep it clean, and stay on the subject or we might delete your comment. If you see inappropriate language,
e-mail us. You must have a javascript enabled browser to submit a comment.

Your Name Your Comment

  INSIDE THE VANCOUVER SUN  

Home News Opinion Business Sports Entertainment Life Health Technology Travel Jobs Cars Homes Classifieds

DON'T MISS MOST POPULAR FORMATS VANCOUVER SUN TOOLS

Haiti earthquake Snow flies at Cypress Sitemap / RSS About Us

Mountain, but 2010
Trailer Trashed Olympic venue still Contests Contact Us
mired in mud Search for a Job Place a Classified Ad
Fatabase Blogs Work for Us
City of Richmond to Buy/Sell a Car E-m a i l A l e r t s
Olympics Columnists Advertise with Us
investigate status of
Real Estate Listings
Super Bowl Lulu Island Winery Photo Galleries Subscribe to the Print
Edition
Quiz Canuck notebook: Videos
Canucks send message Rate Our Delivery
Why I cherish to CBC with silence Mobile Service and WIN
Community of Interest Newspaper in Education
Free trial

Alerts
 

About canada.com Privacy Statement Terms Copyright & Permissions © 2008 - 2009 Canwest Publishing Inc. All rights reserved.
Unauthorized distribution, transmission or republication strictly prohibited.