I enjoy reading the Watts Up With That? website. It is contrarian on global warming. The above is material put together by by Anthony Watts from material sent to him by a reader. This is quite humorous... the media is recycling a horror story of Antarctic sea ice breaking off and melting. But if you read the blog entry, you discover that this is an old story that has been recycled as a doomsday warning for years. The problem is that the media does no fact checking, so it is pliant to manipulation by groups with an agenda. In this case, the global warming crowd.
Read this blog entry on the Wilkins Ice Shelf Collapse and judge for yourself.
I like Anthony Watts' site. He has got a small army of volunteers investigating the hundreds of weather statons. His group has documented that large numbers have allowed encroachment by structures and environmental changes that bias their measurements to record "rising temperatures". Many break the rules about placement. So it raises suspicions about the "data" underlying the global warming story. Click here to see some of these blog entries.
I have a hard time getting excited about "global warming". I agree lots of money should be spent on research, but I don't see anything that makes me believe that doomsday is upon us. Instead, I am all too aware of the apocalyptic fascination by a significant portion of the population and how the media can feed into this. Here's the NOAA site with the famous "hockey stick" global warming graph: the Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index.
But if you look a little further down the page, you find the 1880-2008 U.S. Temperature chart:
The problem I have is reconciling the above with the runaway global warming. The U.S. is a substantial chunk of the earth's surface, but I sure don't see any "runaway" global warming in the above data. (The measure of "anomaly" is how much the temperature differed from the average of the extended period of time.) Sure, there has been a runup in temps since 1970, but 2008 shows a value very close to the average over the whole period!
Combine these "measured" temperatures with the suspicions about weather stations located within heat island cities or weather stations that break rules and collect tainted data, then even the "rise" in continental US temps reflected in the above graph are not as credible as you would think.
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