Monday 27th September

By now everyone should have gathered that I’m not exactly enamoured of the religion known as AGW. I’ve been reading and following WUWT for a long time, I do read the garbage at Real Climate, more for the laughs, and just to see how snarky and childish Gavin Schmidt can get whenever he is proved wrong.

Anyway, Anthony Watts at WUWT is compiling a list of USHNC Weather stations in the USA, photographing, measuring, and checking them against the guidelines for accurate siting. If anyone thinks weather stations are sacrosanct, and are in carefully preserved and pristine areas, take a look at the sub-stations file in WUWT Projects. (Link to Surface stations at the bottom) From this project, it has been suggested we start compiling weather stations from around the world. So it was out to Henderson Field Airport I went this afternoon, camera ready and waiting. I knew where the weather station is, I’ve seen it often enough flying in and out.

Remember that this is the weather station that reports the temperature that is used for the Western Pacific region based on the Solomon Islands. And this is compiled into the reports that go to make up the “Global Average temperature” which was the foundation for John Keys idiotic acceptance and passing of the ETS scheme in New Zealand.

Therefore, you would think that surely this station would be in a position where it can accurately and consistently measure the temperatures, wind, rain etc. In all fairness it is in a good position, away from most of the buildings, but still has the tarmac, and a couple of buildings to the Northeast. It would rate about 4 on the USHCN Station Site Quality scale for adjustments, which means the measurements need to be adjusted DOWN by 2 – 3 *C.

Class 1: Flat and horizontal ground surrounded by a clear surface with a slope below 1/3 (less than 19º). Grass/low vegetation ground cover less than 10 centimeters high. Sensors located at least 100 meters from artificial heating or reflecting surfaces, such as buildings, concrete surfaces, and parking lots. Far from large bodies of water, except if it is representative of the area, and then located at least 100 meters away. No shading for a sun elevation greater than 3
degrees.
Class 2: Same as Class 1 with the following differences. Surrounding vegetation less than 25 centimeters. Artificial heating sources within 30 meters. No shading for a sun elevation greater than 5º.
Class 3: (error 1ºC) Same as Class 2, except no artificial heating sources within 10 meters.
Class 4: (error greater than 2ºC) Artificial heating sources less than 10 meters.
Class 5: (error greater than 5ºC) Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such as a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.

Add in the effect you will see in the photos below, and you will understand why I’m so bloody well sceptical about the whole con game Al Gore, CRU, GISS, HADCRUT, James Hansen, Phil Jones, James Connelly, Michael Mann, et al have perpetuated. And that is without going on to the IPCC and Patchuri.

It is hot here, 30*C is probably a good guess at the average year round daytime temp, we do get hotter, we can get really cooler like 26*C, but if you say 30*C no one is going to violently disagree.

If we look at the weather station, it is positioned at the corner of the landing strip, and the apron in front of the terminal. Planes exit the runway, roll down the short connecting road into the terminal area.

As you can see in this next set.


As the planes roll onto the apron, they turn slowly, and the exhaust points directly at the weather station. I’m only a dumbass maintenance fitter/ welder/ horticulturalist/ teacher, but I have suspicions about just how accurate the sensors in the Stevenson Screen are going to be after being subjected to several jet exhausts a day, both on arrival and again on departure.


Remember these are the instruments used to determine if the tropics are warming in line with AGW doomsday projections. And on which all the carbon taxes, ETS schemes, carbon trading, electricity pricing are based, and the justification for cluttering the landscape with grossly inefficient wind turbines. And don’t even try to tell me they are efficient. If they were they wouldn’t need subsidies, tax breaks, and a tax on other forms of energy production.

We’ve already had the same argument in New Zealand with NIWA and Salinger fabricating and altering data to suit his own agenda. Quotes from Quadrant On Line related to this,

Quote: The official archivist of New Zealand’s climate records, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), offers top billing to its 147-year-old national mean temperature series (the “NIWA Seven-station Series” or NSS). This series shows that New Zealand experienced a twentieth-century warming trend of 0.92°C.
The official temperature record is wrong. The instrumental raw data correctly show that New Zealand average temperatures have remained remarkably steady at 12.6°C +/- 0.5°C for a century and a half. NIWA’s doctoring of that data is indefensible.
The NSS is the outcome of a subjective data series produced by a single Government scientist, whose work has never been peer-reviewed or subjected to proper quality checking. It was smuggled into the official archive without any formal process. It is undocumented and sans metadata, and it could not be defended in any court of law. Yet the full line-up of NIWA climate scientists has gone to extraordinary lengths to support this falsified warming and to fiercely attack its critics.
Quote : Global warming during the 20th Century was 0.6C, with a margin of error of +/-0.2C. The Southern Hemisphere warming was less than half that level. But New Zealand warming, according to NIWA, was almost twice the global average - and with no error margins mentioned.
Referring to the NIWA web page, one finds that this major warming trend is the product of a single study involving only 7 temperature stations - out of the 238 stations which currently report to NIWA. In response to a request under the Official information Act, NIWA has disclosed that this study was undertaken as part of a student’s thesis some 30 years ago.
NIWA has no record of how the NSS came to be in their computers. The only reasonable inference is that the student himself, one Jim Salinger, must have added it when he became NIWA’s Principal Scientist many years later.
Quote: “About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.
The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming..”
So the NIWA warming trend was revealed as entirely man-made, and all within NIWA’s own office. There was no external peer-review. To this day there hasn’t even been an internal review or any form of quantity control. There is no documentation.

And on this the whole stupid tax increasing cost increasing ETS scheme was foisted on New Zealand.

If anyone is taking notice, Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs’) have been dropping in the past few years, and with the La Nina starting to take effect SSTs’ have dropped even faster in the last few months. If anyone can remember New Zealand in the 1950’s and early 60’s, when we had snow falls, ok, not much, but still snow, on the Bombay Hills south of Auckland, and frosts and fog throughout Auckland, guess what, we’ll be seeing them again soon.

And all those vineyards and dairy farms in Southland? If you have shares in them, I’d advise selling out now while it’s good, I have a feeling dairy and grapes don’t do so well when it is below freezing for months at a time and snow is everywhere.

Another 5 years without disruptions, and the Pacific Decahedral Oscillation (PDO) turns negative in 2015 to match the Atlantic Decahedral Oscillation which is negative now, and then we’ll see some great winters. It’s time to be building a couple of new power stations in New Zealand, we have all the coal, if we don’t keep selling it to the Chinese, to keep New Zealand energy rich for a few hundred years until we get a couple of thorium reactors sited. Hell, we could get the Chinese to build a few coal fired stations for us, they are commissioning a new one every few days at the moment, fired by Australian and New Zealand coal. Guess which country isn’t going to be short of energy, and cheap energy as well.

Add in the extremely low Cycle 24 that the Sun is in at present, and the Maunder Minimum looks likely, although my guess is just the normal 30 year cooling period. We’re about 10 years into it now, or close, so about 2050 will see another warming trend start hopefully. I doubt I’ll be here to see it, but I hope Damian, Hayden, Jesse Kahu all remember and don’t get sucked in by the next wave of hysteria when it happens

Ok not my usual post, but after getting the pics today, I felt like having a rant.

Thanks to
http://wattsupwiththat.com/ Anthony Watts.

www.SurfaceStations.org

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/ Jeff Id at The AirVent

Willis Eschenbach for numerous articles, papers, and informed and witty discussions.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/

Numerous other websites, people, articles, that I should mention but I’ve lost the addresses, titles, headings etc for.