Author: Steve Apple

Every day for the past 10 or 15 years, we as a public have been Bombarded with the message of global warming. So much so, that it has passed the status of "theory" and entered the realm of "accepted fact." It has become clear over those years that this is an issue not of physical science, but of political science. To begin with, let me express that I do not know if global warming is scientifically true or not. In my opinion, there is not sufficient evidentiary DATA to support an argument for either side. However I do know one thing.

The same people that are trying to scare the public with global warming, were issuing cries of a new ice age over thirty years ago. I have not lived long enough to know what their battle cry was before that. However, I know that some of you who are joining sides on this argument are not old enough to have witnessed the issue I have just mentioned, and you should take it into consideration.

Having spent my entire adult life dealing with issues of real-time data, I would like to expose you to some data issues associated with the cries of global warming which go to the base of the argument, and render it presently hollow at the least, and potentially even fraudulent.

"Scientists generally agree that the earth's temperature has risen by 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century."

1. As the first piece of evidence, I point you to the data measuring devices of the past one hundred years. Until about 1980, temperature measurement consisted of reading the position of either mercury or colored alcohol next to a scale inside what we called a thermometer. Now, if any of you have perfected a method for reading a thermometer within better than a degree Fahrenheit, please raise your hand. Most are considered accurate to within 2 degrees, and that's assuming they've been cross-checked to see the tube did not slip, or the alcohol separate, or whatever else. Anybody who has done lab experiments knows how tough it is to read the bottom of the meniscus properly. Three other lab partners and I continuously got different results and we were using laboratory quality equipment.

That means our international temperature database is dependent on the skill of people like my neighbors down the lake? Very proud that they were the local official temperature reporters in our farm community? And their aptitude toward pessimism or optimism in reading the true temperature. My grandmother used to insist that they seldom got it right, and you could tell when they had a bad day, or went out of town. Equally important was the need to actually report it daily, and at the same exact time. So, let's begin by admitting that the only time we've been able to measure temperature to within +/- 0.1 degree has been the last twenty years. And if you know the calibration routines for those early digital thermometers, you might change that value to the last ten years or so. Also note that such accurate equipment is still available in very few locations even today. That means we will not have a good idea about the temperature change (to the number of significant digits quoted) across 100 years for another 90 years. True statisticians will argue that we can extrapolate with some degree of confidence, but that does not even hold any statistical weight for at least another 50 years.

2. Next, I direct you to the point-in-time nature of the recorded value. What if they took the reading every day at 3 p.m. and that was the only time of the day when it was that particular temperature? Or, what if they missed by a few hours? Today's systems have maximum and minimum temperature tracking (an innovation within the last 10 years or so), but what was the DISTRIBUTION of temperature over the day? Was it hotter longer than it was colder? So, to be correct, we really need to integrate that temperature across the time and the space which it occupied to get a characterization of HEAT CONTENT for a given region.

3. Which leads me to the next point: How many temperature measurements were taken simultaneously at enough locations across the globe to warrant that the heat gained in one area was not being balanced by a heat loss in another area? As a further complication, I can point you to areas of the globe where there has NEVER been a temperature measurement. In a town called Marble Bar, in Australia, they stop measuring temperature when it exceeds 40 C. "Too bloody depressing," they say. So, how do you accommodate for all these lacking measurements in a calculation of "global warming"? I should add that few people live in the vast overheated and under-heated areas of the world, and so they are statistically under-represented. (Do you want to be responsible for the weather tracking system in the Sahara?)

4. Lastly, how was all of the data synchronized, so that it gave a picture of the INSTANTANEOUS heat content of the entire globe? I have not seen any attempts to synchronize global data, integrate it across all regions, and plot it across time as an "instantaneous global heat content." CNN, you have a new assignment.

Taking only these issues into account, you can see that the error Of temperatures reported in the last hundred years was much greater than the change to which you are attributing human intervention. There are a myriad of other ignored issues that I don't need to go into, because these four alone are sufficient. I won't even touch the issues about CO2's detrimental contribution and the statistics they've touted to support that side of the argument. You can undertake that practice at home using similar reasoning to what I've revealed.

It is clear that statistical conclusions that lead to global warming cannot be drawn from the current data. Only when all of these issues are addressed can a complete picture be assembled. Unfortunately, a sufficient amount of data will not be available until long after we're pushing up daisies, and temperature measurement has become an entirely different issue. The comedian Steven Wright once said that he was pretty sure he would go to hell when he died, and he heard it was hot, and he wondered, "Yes, but is it humid?" Anybody who lives in Houston understands his sentiment.

Steve Apple

This article is copied at the kindness of Mr. Apple. I found it here.