July 1, 2013
Scam in-the-making...
From a fascinating (to me at least) piece on "hottest day" records in Death Valley, from Watts Up With That?:
"The devil's in the details," as the saying goes, and Anthony Watts has spent years investigating the details of our system of weather stations. If you follow his work it seems clear that a lot of "global warming" is due to problems with the stations that record temperatures. Typically with stations that once were properly sited now sitting among parking lots and buildings. But here's a new twist, a station badly sited on purpose...
...In all of Death Valley, the ARC has chosen just about the hottest spot possible in the hottest valley in North America. They have in effect put it [a new weather station] into a natural oven - and done so in the full knowledge of Badwater's topography. Now all they have to do is wait - wait for the inevitable day when the conditions will be just right - clear skies, still air, a blazing sun, and that instrument will heat up from the combined heating of the air, the immense heating from the nearby cliff only metres behind the instrument, the intense reflected heat radiation from the salt pan, and the mercury will very likely fall over the Libyan line and record the `hottest temperature ever measured on earth'.
Then we will see the champagne corks fly as the greenhouse industry will cry with righteous indignation, announcing the `new hottest temperature ever recorded on earth', how it's all due to global warming etc. etc. and all the time, the whole thing will be about as fake as a three dollar bill.
Even the wording on the plaque on the instrument betrays the real intent - the exclusive emphasis on the significance of heat, of global warming, of record-breaking temperatures, of the `hottest year ever' etc. The plaque speaks of little else. Even the opening words of the text are `Carbon dioxide released by human activities etc. ....'. Consequently, it is reasonable to conclude that record-breaking is the primary purpose of the instrument, not genuine climatic research...
...If there is a media announcement of a record being broken at Death Valley, the skeptical observer should immediately demand to know if the record was broken at Furnace Creek, or at Badwater. If it is Furnace Creek, then the record will be quite genuine. But if it is Badwater, then the record will be a complete fake....
He also debunks the recent "hottest day" in Las Vegas, NV.
Posted by John Weidner at July 1, 2013 6:46 AM