Flawed climate data used to create 'crisis,' curb your travel freedom

In essence, the temperature stations that were once located in rural areas are now in many cases surrounded by roads, buildings, airports, and cities. This produces additional localized warming around the thermometer, which gives the appearance of drastic “global warming” when many similar stations are examined together.

The IPCC has acknowledged the urban heat island effect and the contamination of the data; however, according to the scientists who spoke with The Epoch Times, the U.N. agency has mistakenly assumed it’s a minor issue.

In a new peer-reviewed study, the coalition of scientists estimate that as much as 40 percent of the observed warming since the 19th century used by the IPCC is actually the result of this urban heat bias—not CO2-driven global warming.

“When we look at non-urban temperature data for the land, oceans, and other temperature records, the warming is much less dramatic and seems similar to other warm periods prior to the Industrial Revolution,” Mr. Connolly said.

The IPCC doesn’t control for the urban heat island effect, he said.

When Mr. Connolly and other scientists created a temperature record using only rural temperature stations, almost half of the global warming alleged by the U.N. body disappeared.

Indeed, the rural-only datasets match the weather balloon and satellite data much more closely.

“The Medieval Warm Period seems to have been about as warm as the modern warm period, but only when we use the rural-only record,” Mr. Connolly said.

While there has been global warming since the end of the Little Ice Age, if the urban datasets are excluded, all of the primary global temperature estimates show “that the planet alternates between phases of warming and cooling,” he said.
The current warming period began in the 1970s as scientists were still warning about alleged man-made global cooling, which had begun in the 1940s.

Michael Connolly, another independent scientist at CERES and Ronan Connolly’s father, noted that urban warming in cities, which cover about 3 percent of the Earth’s land surface, is in fact becoming a “major problem” that ought to be addressed.

“But, it cannot be cured by greenhouse gas policies,” he said. “Instead, we should be investing more into urban greening and other measures to try and reduce urban heat waves.”

The problem, which Ronan Connolly and his colleagues refer to as “urban blending,” involves the comparisons made between temperature records from one station and others in the surrounding area.

If one seems way out of sync with the others, the program assumes it was a non-climactic bias that should be corrected.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this is that it allows urban warming to contaminate the entire temperature record by blending it with rural data.

The result is that urban and rural data are blended together, allowing some of the urban warming to be mixed in with the rural data that doesn’t have the problem.

“A useful analogy is if you mix strawberries and bananas in a blender, afterward you have a blended homogenous mix that is neither strawberries nor bananas,” Ronan Connolly said.

“Looking at the temperature data, this means that the homogenized rural records contain the urban warming, too.”

The supposed “unusual” global warming cited by the IPCC and other sources is only found in the urban data contaminated by heat associated with cities, he said. But by using the homogenized data, all of it becomes artificially biased by the urban heat effect.

“If we look at the temperature data that has not been contaminated by urban warming, it seems that the temperature changes since before the Industrial Revolution have been almost cyclical—cooling periods followed by warming periods,” Ronan Connolly said.

“This cannot be explained in terms of increasing greenhouse gases, since those have been only going upward. Instead, it suggests that the scientists who have been mistakenly mixing together urban warming with non-urban temperature changes have been chasing a red herring with their belief that CO2 is the main climate driver.”

However, not everyone is convinced that these issues are as significant as CERES scientists have suggested.

Professor Robert Lund, a recognized expert in this field and chair of the statistics department at the University of California–Santa Cruz, told The Epoch Times that the arguments put forth by Mr. Soon and his colleagues made him “cringe.”

“It is true that many climate scientists generally don’t use the best methods to clean up the data,” Mr. Lund said.

But the CERES scientists’ “contention that the warming inferences we are making are bunk because of the gauge changes and station relocation issues, and their suboptimal handling in homogenization procedures, are just not true,” he said.

“In fact, no matter how you deal with the changepoint issues, all globally averaged series (like the IPCC series) contain strong upward trends. It’s just that simple.”

The homogenization issue “might account for maybe 0.1 or 0.2 degrees Celsius per century of the 1.3 [degrees Celsius] that we are globally warming, but not more,” Mr. Lund said.

He accused the CERES scientists of “trying to take any amount of uncertainty, exponentiate it, and discredit everything.”

Asked if he was planning to refute their studies in a paper of his own, Mr. Lund said he and others in the field have grown weary of battling scientists who, he suggested, were mostly interested in discrediting the climate narrative.

A number of other scientists on both sides of the debate didn’t respond to requests for comment.

And outside of Europe and North America, there’s very little coverage.

Until recently, data from the oceans—making up more than two-thirds of the planet’s surface—were also sparse, confined primarily to occasional readings from major shipping lanes in the Northern Hemisphere.

By 2022, about 96 percent of the stations failed to meet the agency’s own standards for reliability, a study by meteorologist Anthony Watts revealed.

Michael Connolly pointed out that when the weather stations were originally set up, they were meant to monitor day-to-day weather, not long-term climate changes.

“While most of the scientists that I talk to on a personal level admit that they have reservations about aspects of the current climate change narrative, they say that their institutions would suffer if they speak out,” he said.

Mr. Soon acknowledged that measuring climate change was a “very difficult scientific problem,” especially because the data are imperfect. But scientists have an obligation to be honest about that.

“Many research groups—in a rush to get grants and to get their work published—seem to have overlooked the serious problems of the data they are using,” he said, adding that many scientists are concerned about job security and are unwilling to speak out.

But some analysts who have seen the issues say it’s deliberate fraud.

Echoing the concerns about homogenization and blending, he told The Epoch Times that “the operating theory seems to be that mixing in a lot of very bad ingredients will create a good soup.”

Mr. Heller accuses NOAA of tampering with its data to create the “appearance of warming” and calls the global and U.S. temperature records “propaganda, not science.”

The misleading adjustments made to the data and the broader deception are “absolutely intentional,” he said.

“Trillions of dollars are being poured in to push global warming and climate change.”

So far, the studies by Mr. Soon and others haven’t been countered in any peer-reviewed literature.

Neither the IPCC nor NASA’s top climate scientist Gavin Schmidt responded to a request for comment.