Letter to the Editor: No PhD needed
BY Alan McCaslin, Coffeyville, KS
Monday, November 26, 2012
11/26/12 at 3:06 AM
Emily Hyde's assertion that weather extremes prove global warming and that information has been cherry-picked to exclude proof of global warming ignores an inconvenient fact ("Global warming real," Nov. 19). In June of 1988, James Hansen, NASA's Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, or GISS, which compiles the official global temperature record, appeared before Al Gore's Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works and was promised lavish funding to go and find proof of his global warming theories.
NOAA, which works hand-in-hand with GISS collecting the raw temperature data, suddenly slashed three-quarters of weather reporting stations it used for this purpose, from 6,000 to 1,500, eliminating stations in cooler, rural and high latitude and high altitude locales. Canadian stations, for example, dropped from 496 to just 35 by 1991.
"Cherry picking?" It doesn't require a PhD in physics to understand that this introduced a warming bias into the record, which nonetheless shows that global temperatures have remained flat or cooled over the past 16 years.
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