Have NASA And NOAA Been Complicit In AGW Fraud?

As I mentioned in my regular Sunday post, ClimateGate is the gift that keeps on giving.

The type of data and computer code manipulation committed by climate scientists at the CRU apparently has also been committed by NASA and NOAA as well, with non-global warming supporting temperature readings being eliminated, in turn showing a false increase in temperatures.

We don’t dispute the fact that there has been some cyclical warming in recent decades — most notably from 1979 to 1998 — but cooling took place from the 1940s to the late 1970s, again after 1998, and especially after 2001, all while CO2 rose. This fact alone questions the primary role in climate change attributed to CO₂ by the IPCC, environmental groups, and others.

However, the global surface station data is seriously compromised.

There was a major station dropout — and an increase in missing data from remaining stations — which occurred suddenly around 1990. Just about the time the global warming issue was being elevated to importance in political and environmental circles.

A clear bias was found towards removing higher elevation, higher latitude, and rural stations — the cooler stations — during this culling process, though that data was not also removed from the base periods from which “averages,” and then anomalies, were computed.

The data also suffers contamination by urbanization and other local factors, such as land-use/land-cover changes and improper siting.

There are also uncertainties in ocean temperatures. This is no small issue, as oceans cover 71% of Earth’s surface.

These factors all lead to significant uncertainty and a tendency for overestimation of century-scale temperature trends. A conclusion from all findings suggests that global databases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends, or rankings, or to validate model forecasts. Consequently, such surface data should be ignored for political decision-making.

Many of the warmists say it doesn't matter if the data was cooked because they 'know' we're all doomed unless we impoverish the world and return to agrarian level energy usage. They believe no more debate or study is needed, only action.

But with more respected and credentialed scientists calling AGW into question and pointing to the fraudulent data and the incomprehensible and questionable computer code, neither the debate or the science is settled. Before we spend trillions of dollars on a theory of questionable validity, shouldn't we go back over all the data and modeling software and verify it's accuracy?

To add to the debate, it appears that if we look at just rural US MSS station data going back to 1900, there is no evidence of global warming.

Using data downloaded from NASA GISS and picking rural sites near, but not too near, to urban sites, a comparison has been made of the temperature trend over time of the rural sites compared to those of the urban sites. 28 pairs of sites across the U.S. were compared. The paired rural site is from 31 to 91 km from the urban site in each pair. The result is that urban and rural sites were similar in 1900, with the urban sites slightly higher. The urban sites have shown an increase in temperatures since then. The rural sites show no such temperature increase and appear to be generally unchanging with only ups and downs localized in time. Over a 111 year time span, the urban sites temperatures have risen to be about 1.5C warmer than the rural sites. So, the much touted rising temperatures in the U.S. are due to the urban heat island effect and not due to a global warming such as has been proposed to be caused by human emissions of CO2 due to the combustion of fossil fuels.

It's not just rural US stations seeing this non-trend. Canadian ground station in Ontario are seeing the same thing. If global warming were happening to the extent the warmists claim, wouldn't rural weather stations data show it as well? Or might we make the assumption that global warming is only an urban phenomenon? By positing such a hypothesis, might we also state the cure would be to do away with all urban areas (cities) and move everyone back into the countryside? (Yes, it is a ridiculous hypothesis and equally ridiculous 'cure', but both have as much validity as the present AGW theory and proposed cure.)