Cooking the Books

NOAA Relies On ‘Compromised’ Thermometers That Inflate US Warming Trend

“The majority of weather stations used by NOAA to detect climate change temperature signal have been compromised by encroachment of artificial surfaces like concrete, asphalt, and heat sources like air conditioner exhausts,” Anthony Watts, a seasoned meteorologist and lead author of the study, said in a statement Thursday.

These “compromised” weather stations run hotter than stations that are well-sited, and are used by NOAA as a benchmark to make upward adjustments for other weather stations that are part of the agency’s official temperature record.

Watts and his fellow researchers found only 410 “unperturbed” weather stations out of the 1,218 stations used by NOAA to determine U.S. climate trends. These “unperturbed” stations don’t need to be adjusted by NOAA because they had not been moved, had any equipment changes, or change in the time temperatures were observed.

Put more simply, they adjusted data from sites which had seen no infrastructure change to match the trend in sites which had seen significant infrastructure change, (i.e., urbanization), when elementary statistical analysis procedures say that it should have been done in exactly the opposite manner. There are two possible reasons for this behavior:

1) Hundreds of people at NOAA with decades of experience, scientific knowledge and specialized degrees don't understand the most basic principle of statistical analysis, or;

2) They have a political agenda which is closely related to their federal funding.

Apply Occam's Razor and see which of those possibilities remains.


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