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I was driving from the office to a client this morning when I happened to switch the channel from XM’s Opie and Anthony to the Glenn Beck show.  To my suprise, there was a guest talking about global warming.  But, this wasn’t your typical global warming guest.  It wasn’t a guy screaming about how all of the algae is going to die and the world is F*&Ked if we don’t all sell our SUVs and go buy a Hybrid Prias right now!  He wasn’t calling for everyone to reduce their carbon footprint, recycle, or even carpool.

In fact, he was discussing something that I found particularly interesting (as an accountant who deals with compliance issues about 70% of my work-time):  the rules and guidelines used by NOAA temperature reading sites.

If you don’t know, NOAA (the National Oceanic Atmospheric Adiminstration) is the agency that compiles lots of weather data for the US.  This data is used for all sorts of things, especially research (I have used NOAA data before for several litigation support cases I’ve worked on to prove things like how much it rained in a particular location over a couple year span, and hurricane weather activity).  And this data is very instrumental for researchers across the globe in determining the Earth’s climate changes and climate activites.  There are a little more than 1,200 weather stations around the US that record and trasmit weather data in the NOAA network.

So this guy was looking to do some research, and he wanted to study the effect of a policy change by NOAA which resulted in the re-painting of its temperature reading stations in the 1970s.  Many of these stations were built and designed in the 1800s, and were designed with the typical “Tom Sawyer” white-washing exterior.  In the 1970s, it was decided that they would be re-painted with latex paint.  This researcher was hoping to study if the new paint had any real affect on the temperature readings being measured at the locations.

So he located 3 stations and set out to see first if they had been re-painted.  When he got to the first one, he did note that it had been re-painted, but he also noted that there was tons of electrical and computer equipment within feet of the thermometor providing the temperature reading (odd, in that why would you place equipment that produces heat near something you’re trying to get an accurate climate reading from?).  Surely this was an anomoly, he thought.  But, he ran into the same thing on at the third station, and his research took a turn in its scope.

From this innocent discovery came Surface Stations.org: an organization of volunteers dedicated to examining weather stations for poor conditions.  To date approximately 40% (500) of the 1,200 stations have been examined, and most have been found with violations of NOAAs own station guidelines.  Things like not having an official thermomiter within 100 feet of asphault, automobiles, electrical equipment, and such.  In fact, 69% of the stations examined so far have been found to have deficiencies in conditions that could result in differences in teperature readings of at least 2 degrees.  14% of the stations have conditions so poor that temperature readings could be overstated as much as 5 or more degrees!

What does this mean?  Well, this whole global warming thing could be a result of nothing more than poor conditions used in keeping temperatures for the past 20 or 30 years!  As cities and counties have sought to find new uses for their weather stations, and ignored guidelines for correct and accurate placement of temperature reading devices, they have perhaps created a larger problem by inadvertantly manipulating temperature data….resulting in the national phenomenom …or epidemic…known as global warming! 

Now it appears that the voices of those scientists claiming that the global warming issue is not as conclusive as the media or most people think might be gaining a little bit of credence.

Of course, as someone who’s not sold on the whole global warming issue, I’m not suggesting that people not try to be conscious of their actions and try to make the environment a better place.  Honestly, it really couldn’t hurt, and it’s probably the right thing to do.  But in today’s world of shock-journalism and researchers trying to get their name out there, is it any suprise that the data surrounding global warming would be suspect to manipulation (inadvertant or not)?

Tags: global warming, Surface Station.org

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 10:52 am and is filed under General, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.