MORE CLIMATE CONTROVERSY

Written by: Brian Neudorff

It's been almost 2 months since we first mentioned "Climategate" and since then there have been a few more controversies pop up in the discussion of Global Warming and Climate Change. Earlier this month, it was discovered that a claim in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035 if current melting continued was false. That claim was questioned in a report by Britain's Sunday Times, which said the reference derived from a news article published in 1999 and had failed to be scrutinized by the IPCC.

Then in the last week another controversy was brought to our attention. It was posted first by a commenter last week on a Friday open discussion post, here is the comment that this individual left:

How can NOAA have made so many changes to the way it measures temperature (one example: down from 1,850 weather stations to 136) and then told us that they were providing apples to apples changes in temperature? What do you think about what's reported here? I am sad to think American agencies might have been purposely providing questionable data.

I saw this again in another article out of the Vancouver Sun titled, "Scientists using selective temperature data, skeptics say" This story is on two American researchers, Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo and computer expert E. Michael Smith, who have released a report [PDF] that claim 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 higher elevation, higher latitude and rural stations, such as Canada and Russia.

The key point mentioned in this study was that from 1980 to around 1990 NOAA rapidly dropped the number of stations it used to gather climate information from 6000 down to just 1500.

An example of this is in Canada. In the 1970s, NOAA used the surface temperatures from nearly 600 Canadian weather stations in their global database. Today NOAA only uses 35 stations across Canada.

What's even more shocking to learn is that one station, at Eureka on Ellesmere Island (pictured above) is the only thermometer now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for everything north of latitude 65N or the Arctic Circle.

These articles and the study itself were very interesting to read, we'd love to have your thoughts on the topic. So please feel free to leave your comments.