G'day all,

The text that follows is a draft of a newspaper article I was asked to write. I haven't done this type of thing before and have no idea whether it is any good.

Any comments, negative or positive will be welcomed and suggestions for improvements will be gratefully received.

It is reproduced in full because it is only 1,000 words.

What if global warming was a myth predicated on a simple mathematical miscalculation? This of course is an absurd statement. Everyday this newspaper and other news agencies publish yet another study further establishing that global warming is not only a fact beyond any reasonable argument but something which needs urgent attention.

But what if the statement was not all that absurd, what effect would it have on your thinking on global warming? Australia has very reliable weather records. They date back well into the 19th Century. So does the USA and Canada. There is a pesky problem with temperature records because cities have been absorbing more heat than the surrounding countryside but that can always be factored in. The ?urban effect? is well known and has been known for a very long time. In Berlin, for instance, it raised the temperature compared to the adjacent areas by 1.4 C from ? 1886 to 1898. But because that rise is known, the temperature in Berlin can be adjusted in the statistics. So this proves little in relation to global warming. But what of cities such as New York where the urban effect is thought be very large but cannot be calculated because the surrounding areas actually show a cooling trend? Simple really, New York is excluded from the temperatures.

Berlin and New York have reliable temperature records for many years but this is not so true for other locales. The scientists of the world interested in climate change mostly rely on a single source for records of weather stations, the GHCN data set. This is a quote from GHCN:

?A meteorologist working in a tropical country noticed one station had unusually low standard deviation. When he had an opportunity to visit that station, the observer proudly showed him his clean, white instrument shelter in a well cared for grass clearing. Unfortunately, the observer was never sent any instruments so every day he would go up to the shelter, guess the temperature, and dutifully write it down?

Examples of problems in consistent recording abound. Another weather station was moved 100 metres uphill because the bitterly cold wind blowing off a lake was too uncomfortable for those taking the measurements. They found a nice sheltered location instead and never thought to tell anyone about the move.

But these problems pale into insignificance when compared to one simple mathematical error that dams all temperature data to inaccuracies many times greater than global warming. No one ever once thought to set a standard of just what an ?average? was. Not a daily average, nor a monthly average nor any other average when it involves temperature. So each location sets out to make the calculation of the daily average or the monthly average by whatever means they decide.

But it gets worse. Typically, temperature recording through the 20th Century has progressed from two temperatures to multiple daily temperatures and the more temperatures in a day the warmer the average becomes. So how do you calculate global warming if the temperatures have become warmer just because of the arithmetic involved? This is truly an uncomfortable thought. Testing this is quite easy to do yourself. All you need is the weather page and a calculator or even a pencil and paper. Take a typical hot Sydney summer?s day for Western Sydney. The minimum is 24 C and the maximum is 40 C. Add the two figures and divide by two. The average is 32. Now take the temperatures at 9am, noon, 3pm, etc plus the minimum and maximum. For the same day the average will come out at 33.5 using typical intermediate temperatures. That?s a 1.5 C hotter average just because more readings were made. Sydney was not hotter that day. But the average says it was. And Global Warming is about the average Surface Air Temperature (SAT) increasing by 0.6 or 0.8 C in a century.

No wonder the GHCN data, which only includes monthly averages, but for more than 7,000 weather stations around the world, sometimes has as many as six different records for one location, all with different temperatures. The different readings are simply the result of the application of differing ways to calculate the average. And there is no way of determining how any of these averages were calculated. This is the data relied upon by NASA and various other institutions working on Global Warming, to provide their results.

This could all sound like an anti-Global Warming shell game to spread doubt where there should be none except there are ways to measure the temperature other than just the world?s average air temperature from weather stations. Since 1958 there have been weather balloons. Since 1979 a global snapshot of the temperature of the earth is taken 17,000 times a day, currently by two different satellites for further confirmation of accuracy. The weather balloons and the satellites match up very precisely but they do not match up with the surface air temperature at all. The weather stations tell us it has been getting much warmer during the period that the satellites and the balloons give a quite different result. The pattern does not match so there are warm years and cool years in the satellite data that are not in the weather station data. If the weather station average temperature was reliable then the three methods of measuring the average should closely align or at the very least follow the same pattern. Surprisingly, the USA weather station data as calculated by NASA does agree largely with the satellite data. It does not use cities in the calculations because of the urban effect and it shows a cooling trend.

The whole basis of the ?fact? of global warming relies on the simple truth that the world is, well, warming. But if the data that has been used to prove this has little or no value for comparisons over the years which are important, just how factual is the fact of global warming? It may well be that the world has been warming but it is a bit like baking a cake with a faulty oven thermostat, how sure can we be that it is actually heating up?



Regards


Richard

Edit: Sorry. Didn't realise that the degrees symbol turned into a zero when I cut and pasted. Was sort of strange looking at 240 degrees.


Sane=fits in. Unreasonable=world needs to fit to him. All Progress requires unreasonableness