Interesting read. is it just a bunch of mistakes in placing? Or deliberate to achieve desired readings? My opinion would be the latter, but others may have a different take of course.

A critical cog in the machinery that drives the theory of global warming is a small white box not too far from where you live. Inside the box sits a thermometer that tracks the local temperature, which in turn becomes part of a data trail for the monitoring of climate change on Earth.

But there's a problem: Nearly every single weather station the U.S. government uses to measure the country's surface temperature may be compromised. Sensors that are supposed to be in empty clearings are instead exposed to crackling electronics and other unlikely sources of heat, from exhaust pipes and trash-burning barrels to chimneys and human graves.

The National Climate Data Center (NCDC) uses this massive network of sensors to determine daily highs and lows at the 1,219 weather stations in its Historical Climatology Network (HCN). The network has existed since 1892, but only in the last decade has it come under intense scrutiny to determine whether the figures it measures can be trusted.

For the past three years, a group of zealous laymen has visited and photographed nearly every one of the weather stations to determine whether they have been placed properly. And what they found is a stunning disregard for the government's own rules: 90 percent of the sensors are too close to potential sources of heat to pass muster, including some very odd sources indeed:

A sensor in Redding, Calif., is housed in a box that also contains a halogen light bulb, which could emit warmth directly onto the gauge.

• A sensor in Hanksville, Utah, sits directly atop a gravestone, which is not only macabre but also soaks up the sun's heat and radiates it back to the thermometer at night.

• A sensor in Marysville, Calif., sits in a parking lot at a fire station right next to an air conditioner exhaust, a cell phone tower and a barbecue grill.

• A sensor in Tahoe City, Calif., sits near a paved tennis court and is right next to a "burn barrel" that incinerates garbage.

• A sensor in Hopkinsville, Ky., is sheltered from the wind by an adjoining house and sits above an asphalt driveway.

• Dozens of sensors are located at airports and sewage treatment plants, which produce "heat islands" from their sprawling seas of asphalt and heavy emissions

"So far we've surveyed 1,062 of them," said Anthony Watts, a meteorologist who began the tracking effort in 2007. "We found that 90 percent of them don't meet [the government's] old, simple rule called the '100-foot rule' for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence. Ninety percent of them failed that, and we've got documentation."

Watts, who has posted pictures of the sensors on his Web site, SurfaceStations.org, says he believes that the location of the sensors renders their recorded temperatures inaccurate, which in turn brings some of the data behind global warming theory into question.

"It's asinine to think that this wouldn't have some kind of an effect," Watts told FoxNews.com.


http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/...-heat-sources/

Check out http://www.surfacestations.org/ At the bottom of the home page they compare two surface stations. One properly set up along with the GISS graph of it's recordings in Orland, CA (elevation 230ft). The other is in Marysville, CA (elevation 112 ft) about 50 miles away. It is poorly set up with multiple heat sources, there are pictures of both. Compare the GISS temperature maps. For a 118ft difference the elevation and how close the stations are to each other, the temperatures are quite different.

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"I may make you feel, but I can't make you think." - Jethro Tull

Maybe you can explain why a whole country has spent their lives watching a weatherman saying what the temperature in a city, the airport and the surrounding area is and why any of them would think a scientist doesn't know the temperatures are different.

There's a reason why Anthony Watts has not attempted to publish an actual analysis. Using his own classification data, looking at only the "good" stations reveals, if anything, a slightly higher warming trend. Here's a peer-reviewed study published on the topic.

http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/u...e-etal2010.pdf

Described here:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/On-t...re-Record.html

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010...stationsor.php

Such claims, however, have persisted among the dubious blogosphere for awhile. Here's an intuitive explanation about why it's wrong.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...n-heat-island/

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"To the average American who’s struggling, we’re in some other stratosphere. We’re the party of Big Business and Big Oil and the rich." - Sen. Olympia Snowe (R)

Budget surplus inherited by Bush: $236 billion (CBO, 2000)
Budget deficit inherited by Obama: $1,667 billion (CBO projection, 3/2009)

Is what they're saying is that when you put a thermometer next to the stove and one in the bed room, over time the temperature readings will be the same?

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"I may make you feel, but I can't make you think." - Jethro Tull