January 18, 2023

Several recently published studies have provided methodological objections to alarmist IPCC global climate models that predict catastrophic global warming will result from anthropogenic CO2 atmospheric concentrations from burning hydrocarbon fuels. These studies indicate that a more accurate reading of the earth’s surface temperatures suggests global climate warming over the next few decades will be moderate. The studies further indicate that more precise surface temperature readings would seriously dampen the hysterical mass media demand for radical public policies requiring radical decarbonization to achieve Net Zero Emissions (NZE) as quickly as possible.

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In November 2022, meteorologist Roy Spencer, Ph.D., a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, published a ground-breaking study demonstrating that 36 climate models used to guide national policy may have exaggerated “global warming” over the last 50 years by as much as 50 percent. Specifically, Dr. Spencer utilized “a relatively new global dataset of urbanization changes over the previous 40-year period, 1975-2014, based on Landsat data to determine the average effect urbanization has had on surface temperatures.”

Spencer devised a methodology “to compute the magnitude of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect on temperatures using the example of summertime early morning 09 UTC (early morning) Integrated Surface Database (ISD) hourly data (mostly from airports) over the period 1973-2022.” (“UTC” stands for Universal Time Coordinated, formally known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).) His goal was to compare “urbanization differences to temperature differences from closely spaced weather stations.”

Image: Putting out the “earth fire by Andrea Widburg, using a rawpixel image and a Racool_studio image.

Using this methodology, Spencer’s results were astounding: “The results for the U.S. lead to a 50-year warming trend 50 percent less than that from the official National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) homogenized surface temperature dataset.” (Emphasis added.)

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Spencer’s research shows that increased urbanization, not increased CO2, is responsible for exaggerating the temperature measurements recorded in the NOAA homogenized surface temperature dataset. In other words, Spencer’s point is that observed increases in temperature result from the greater heat urbanization generates, not from increased CO2 concentrations generated in the atmosphere by burning hydrocarbon fuels. Spencer was able to achieve this result by eliminating the negative Urban Heat Island bias from the NOAA temperature database to get more truthful readings of the CO2 heat forcing effect.

Remember, the core “global warming” argument is that CO2 alone is the earth thermometer that controls whether earth temperatures are hotter or colder on average. As Spencer has said, “Given that U.S. energy policy depends upon the predictions from these models, their tendency to produce too much warming (and likely also warming-associated climate change) should be factored into energy policy planning.” Spencer has also charged that “climate change exaggerations (are) routinely promoted by environmental groups, anti-oil advocates, the media, the politicians, and most government agencies.”

Spencer is not alone in pointing to corrupt data. In August 2022, meteorologist Anthony Watts found that 96 percent of the temperature stations in the United States used to measure global warming and climate change did not “meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be ‘acceptable,’ uncorrupted placement.”

To reach this conclusion, Watts “compiled satellite and in-person visits to NOAA weather stations” that provide “official” temperature data. His visits revealed that these stations are corrupted by localized effects of urbanization—producing heat-bias because of their close proximity to asphalt, machinery, and other heat-producing, heat-trapping, or heat-accentuating objects.”

The study concluded that placing NOAA temperature stations in such urban settings “violates NOAA’s own published standards, and strongly undermines the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States.”

There’s more. In August 2022, Nicola Scafetta, at the Department of Earth Sciences, Environment and Georesources, University of Naples, Italy, a perennial critic of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) methodology for measuring earth surface temperatures, published a new paper questioning IPCC alarmism over climate models predicting catastrophic climate change.