The Graph That Lied – Watts Up With That?

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Gorilla Science

The graph they built on a lie. The iconic ‘climate’ graph that’s undermining industrial capitalism and taking our freedom…and it’s 100 percent garbage. Watch this film, and learn the shocking truth with ‪@tomnelson2080‬

[editor’s note: Anthony Watts’s surface station work is featured, starting at 3:50]

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Autogenerated and autoformatted transcript.

Look up climate change on the internet

Or check out any mainstream media story about climate change, and you’ll see this graph. This one’s from NOAA, and there’s an almost identical one from NASA. This is the graph for climate alarmists.

We know the Earth is warming. We know the Arctic is melting. Unless we make major changes to stop global warming, the consequences could be irreversible.

This is the graph on which all of those claims about record temperatures are based.

We’re starting to see our temperature on the increase—that’s well stated, well advertised. We see an acceleration of warming over the past 50 years. From 1801 till now, the numbers all say the same thing: the world is getting warmer, faster.

This is the graph that is said by the science TV presenter Brian Cox to prove that global warming is true—human action is leading to an increase in average temperatures.

You may try to argue with that, but you can’t.
“No, I brought the graph!”

But, as we will see in this film, this famous graph is a travesty—a shameful lie masquerading as science.

My name is Tom Nelson, and this is Guerilla Science.

Let’s take a close look at this graph. The agencies that produce these graphs, like NASA, NOAA, and the UK Met Office, all rely on the same data from the US and Global Historical Climatology Networks, which gather temperature recordings from meteorological agencies across the world.

The graph starts in 1850, and we are told that it’s an accurate instrumental temperature record of global temperature change. By instruments, they mean thermometers, as opposed to reconstructing past temperatures from indirect clues like tree rings.

But here we come to a big problem: where a thermometer is located can have a huge effect on its temperature readings.

In the early 20th century, many thermometers were erected just outside towns—easy enough to check every day, but away from the artificial heat of urban life. But as population has risen, those towns have grown.

Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the population of the US—and also globally—has expanded enormously. NOAA’s graph starts in 1850, when America’s population was about 20 million. Today it’s 330 million—16 times as big.

This has led to a huge expansion of towns and cities. In 1900, the population of Phoenix was five and a half thousand. Now it’s about one and a half million. Thermometers that were once in open fields have become engulfed by shopping malls, warehouses, and suburban housing.

This matters because urban areas are much warmer than rural areas. Here, for example, is a satellite heat map of Paris, which can be as much as 6°C warmer than the surrounding countryside. Suburban and semi-rural areas too are significantly warmer than fully rural areas.

Many thermometers in the first half of the 20th century were also located at airports to give pilots information for flight safety. For example, more than half of the temperature stations in the UK are located at airports. But airports, like towns, have grown and changed enormously.

What used to be open airfields with a few propeller planes have turned into vast seas of heat-absorbing concrete, sheltered and surrounded by large terminals, hangars, and car parks, with dozens upon dozens of large jet airliners pumping out hot air.

So how much of so-called global warming is just, in fact, heat generated from population growth and urban expansion? In other words, corrupted temperature data?

The National Weather Service stipulates that temperature reading stations should be 100 feet or more away from anything that artificially reflects or radiates heat—or might otherwise artificially raise temperatures—like cars, buildings, air conditioning units, tarmac, and concrete. In other words: human civilization.

So how are America’s climate tracking thermometers doing?

Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us here on Action News Now.

In 2009, meteorologist and TV weather forecaster Anthony Watts decided to see for himself. He and a team of volunteers inspected and photographed a random selection of 850 temperature reading stations. Where did they find them?

They found them here, and here, and here… They were, for the most part, in the immediate vicinity of machines, buildings, vehicles, and urban infrastructure of one sort or another—by buildings and air conditioning units, by car parks and buildings and air conditioning units, on top of concrete, beside concrete and asphalt, sheltered by buildings, by buildings and cars, beside tarmac and airplanes, in airports, beside electrical equipment. Lots are in car parks.

You get the picture.

According to the 2009 survey, almost 90% of the 850 stations inspected failed to meet the official NWS requirements of being set apart from artificial heat sources.

That creeping urbanization has corrupted global temperature data is freely admitted by many climate scientists. A study carried out by NOAA scientists has concluded:

“These results suggest that small-scale urban encroachment within 50 m of a station can have important impacts on daily temperature extremes—maximum and minimum.”

Another study found that the difference of temperature between urban and rural stations exhibited a progressively statistically significant increase over the studied period.

Multiple studies now suggest that most land thermometers have been corrupted to varying degrees by creeping urbanization.

And it’s not just in the US. A study published by the Royal Meteorological Society found that urbanization has significantly increased the daily minimum temperature in the UK by as much as 1.7°C.

In other words: the whole of the supposed man-made global warming.

One study published in the American Meteorological Journal describes in China the problem of rapid local urbanization around most meteorological stations. The study found that since 1985, the percentage of stations with a significant urban heat bias increased from 22% to 68%.

Another study in China found that urbanization-induced warming is significant, accounting for up to 80% of the overall warming between 1961 and 2000.

This is a well-documented worldwide phenomenon.

Here, for example, is the thermometer temperature record for urban Tokyo since 1907—it’s rising gently. But here is the temperature record for the same period from the nearby rural Hachijojima Islands—there is barely any change.

But it gets worse. Across vast swathes of the Earth, there are no temperature reading stations at all. So what do climate agencies do? Suppose there are no stations in a largely empty African savannah—scientists will take the data from the nearest station in a town or airport many miles away, and they’ll apply that to the entire region.

This treats whole regions effectively as superheated cities.

This is even true of the US. One study of mountain regions in America found that extreme warming observed at higher elevations is the result of systematic artifacts and not climatic conditions. These erroneous adjustments were amplifying warming by as much as 560%.

Now, you might have thought that all of this would be taken into account when calculating temperature change. But no.

The UN’s IPCC has decided that the effect of urban development on the temperature record is negligible. NASA says the impact of these urban heat islands has a minuscule effect on global temperature. Berkeley Earth says the urban heat island effect is real but the effect on our global estimate of land temperatures is indistinguishable from zero.

So in effect, they ignore urbanization and population growth.

All that artificial heating goes into this graph.

But it gets worse. Much worse.

NASA tells us that their scientists make adjustments to account for station temperature data that are significantly higher or lower than that of nearby stations. By comparing data with surrounding stations, they identify abnormal station measurements, which are then assumed to be wrong.

The trouble is, many of the abnormal station measurements which are eliminated are likely to be rural stations which show little or no warming.

According to one analysis of official temperature adjustment, the good quality stations are likely to be considered as statistical outliers. Instead of correcting the poorly and badly sited station records to match the well-sited stations, it appears to have blended the temperature records of all stations to match the poorly sited stations.

The US temperature record is by far the most reliable, longest-running temperature record in the world. The actual temperature readings from all the official USHCN thermometers across the country suggest that, despite the increase in urbanization, average temperatures today are lower than they were in the 1930s.

Let’s look at how this data has been adjusted by official agencies—supposedly to correct for artificial bias. Instead of reducing the amount of warming, incredibly, they’ve done the exact opposite.

The adjustments are even more extreme when we look at maximum temperatures.

Here’s the actual data from US thermometers showing maximum temperatures since 1895—there is no signal of any global warming. But now look at the same data once it’s been adjusted by climate agencies—suddenly the temperature looks like it’s rising.

And this is happening all over the world.

Here is the raw average temperature record in Australia taken from thermometers—showing no warming since the 1980s. And here is the adjusted record—showing a significant increase.

Here’s raw temperature data from weather stations in Greece—no warming. After it’s adjusted—lots of warming.

Raw data from Ireland—a slight cooling. Once it’s adjusted—suddenly there’s warming.

Here is the raw temperature data from Reykjavik since 1900—current temperatures are similar to those of the 1940s. And here’s the adjusted data, which shows massive warming.

You get the idea.

Is there any other way of testing if this famous graph is accurate or the result of corrupt data, exaggerated still further by poor data handling?

Yes, there are several:

1. Just examine the temperature readings from rural stations only. Forget the urban thermometers. This has now been done. Here is the temperature record of the US since 1880 taken from rural thermometers. Temperatures rose significantly to the 1930s and ’40s, then fell dramatically to the late 1970s. They have risen since then, but today they are barely higher than they were in the 1940s.

Here is the temperature record from China using only rural stations. Once again, the 1940s look as hot or hotter than today.

It’s the same pattern again and again—with little or no net warming since the 1940s.

2. If the heating was mainly urban, you’d expect to see less temperature change evident in tree rings—since the trees measured tend to be in rural areas. And again, this is exactly what we find.

Here’s a record of temperature change from tree rings going back 200 years. Not surprisingly, it closely resembles the rural temperature record—a rise to the 1940s, a sharp drop to the 1970s, and then a recovery with recent temperatures on par with those of the 1940s.

Here is another tree ring study published in Climates of the Past, showing no net warming between 1940 and 2000.

Here’s another, published in Geophysical Research Letters, covering the past 1,500 years—it shows variation, but no overall trend. If we zoom into the last 200 years, it shows the same pattern with temperatures at the end of the 20th century cooler than the 1930s.

Every one of these studies directly contradicts the graph being pushed by official climate agencies.

3. In urban and suburban areas, concrete, tarmac, and brick soak up heat in the day and then release it during the cold night. Minimum temperatures usually happen at night. As a result, the most obvious signal of urban heat bias is a rise in minimum temperatures as recorded at night.

Remember that Royal Meteorological Society paper:
“Urbanization has significantly increased the daily minimum temperature in the UK by as much as 1.7°C.”

What do we find in the US?
Here from NOAA is a record of maximum summer temperatures in the US since 1895—there’s not much change. And as we see, according to NOAA’s own data, summer temperatures in the US are still not as high as they were in the 1930s.

But how about minimum temperatures over the same period? They’ve been rising. That is a clear signal that it’s elevated temperatures at night—caused by heat retention in urban environments—that is causing the shift in average recorded temperature data.

And this has been a feature of temperature data across the globe in recent decades.

4. If the recorded warming is just the result of urbanization, we would expect far more warming on land than we do at sea, where there are no towns or cities. And that is exactly what we do find.

Here from Berkeley Earth is the official measure of land temperatures compared to ocean. This ocean data has itself been adjusted to show steady warming (which we’ll look at elsewhere), but even after these adjustments, it still shows that since the 1940s, the rise in recorded land temperature is three times as high as the temperature change in the ocean.

5. If urbanization were to blame, in countries with very little urbanization—like Greenland—you would expect to see far less warming. And that again is what we do find.

Here’s a graph showing temperature records of Greenland since the mid-19th century. Once again, a rise to 1940 followed by decades of falling temperatures, and then a recovery with temperatures today similar to those of the 1940s.

6. If recent warming was due to urbanization and population growth, you would expect to see a much bigger warming signal in the Northern Hemisphere, which is where 90% of the human population lives. And that’s exactly what you do find.

Here’s the official UK Met Office temperature data for the Northern Hemisphere since the 1970s.
And here’s the Southern Hemisphere, which shows far less warming.

There is a huge amount of scientific evidence on this, pointing in one direction.

This graph—this famous graph—the graph on which the whole climate alarm hangs—is not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong.

Not only is it thoroughly corrupted by a false warming signal from population growth, but that warming has itself been magnified and exaggerated by the adjustments made by climate agencies.

There is, to repeat, a mountain of scientific evidence that shows this graph to be wrong.

The graph that we see again and again in the media, in schools, and in presentations to politicians.

The graph that is used to make all these claims about record temperatures.

The graph that is being used to force through the most dramatic and damaging public policies.

The whole of Western industrial society is being turned upside down because of this graph.

Governments in many countries are taking a wrecking ball through their energy and transport systems.

Whole industries are shutting down. Whole populations find themselves bullied out of owning and driving cars, forced to buy certain appliances, find themselves hit at every turn by punitive green taxes and regulations.

Scientists make mistakes all the time—but this is different. Since so much hangs on this graph, we should surely, as a matter of democratic right, be made aware of any evidence at all that might suggest that it’s wrong.

But no. Our publicly funded science establishment and the mainstream media have gone to great lengths to silence any doubts or criticism.

But now we come to the question: why?

Why are so many organizations and so many people so feverishly attached to the idea of man-made global warming?

Let’s look at a publicly funded organization like NASA, which has taken a leading role in promoting the climate scare.

NASA receives $20 billion a year of taxpayer money. Why? They already beat the Soviets to the Moon. There’s no point going again and again. Elon Musk is better at launching rockets.

There’s only so many pictures of the Milky Way that you can look at.

To justify its existence, NASA has decided that its new vital mission is to help us combat climate change. The trouble is, that means that NASA’s continued funding depends on the climate alarm.

And since it has skin in the game, it’s hardly surprising that NASA is only too keen to emphasize the potential horrors of climate chaos.

And it’s not just NASA. There are huge UN agencies, and dozens of university departments, and legions of academics—not to mention all the sustainability officers, climate advisers, and renewables companies—that rely for their funding on the climate alarm.

Hundreds of thousands of careers have been built on this. Countless scientists have staked their reputations on it. Their lives have been defined by it. Their livelihoods depend on it.

But even more than this, the climate alarm has become an article of faith for those on the left. And the left-wing bias within universities, the public sector, mainstream media, and the university-educated intelligentsia more broadly is well-documented and familiar to all.

And that is why it is unacceptable—in universities, the mainstream media, and the publicly funded science establishment—to entertain any doubt.

Contrary evidence must be hushed up. Ignored. Dismissed.

The fiction must be maintained—that this appalling bit of nonsense is a true account of what’s happening in the world.

At Guerilla Science, our aim is to submit the climate alarm—and our tax-munching establishment—to proper scientific scrutiny.

But to carry on, we need your help.

Please subscribe and please, please—if you can—donate.

I’m Tom Nelson, and this is Guerilla Science.

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