Back in the Blogging Dark Ages, when I was still a Junior Blogger, my first online argument came with Steve Appell (I think) from none other than Scientific American  magazine.

I blogged that the data underlying the climate scare was suspect, whereupon he came after me and asked whether I had a degree in climatology.  I replied in the negative, of course, but added that while lacking in that august qualification that my argument was not against the weather, but the data collected thereof — and when it came to predictive modeling, I very much knew what I was talking about, having been a statistician and data analyst pretty much all my working life, and that some of the models I’d been involved in were fantastically accurate — up to 95% accuracy.

Of course, the weather models then (and now) extant were completely hopeless  — not one had ever come close to predicting any kind of reality — and the principle reason was because the data collection methodology was clearly flawed, as the weather / climate measurement station locations had become unrepresentative.

So here we come to today, and nothing has changed — in fact, things have got worse:

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (July 27, 2022) – A new study, Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Surface Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed, finds approximately 96 percent of U.S. temperature stations used to measure climate change fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be “acceptable” and  uncorrupted placement by its own published standards.

The research shows that 96% of 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. Placing temperature stations in such locations violates NOAA’s own published standards (see section 3.1 at this link), and strongly undermines the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States.

“With a 96 percent warm-bias in U.S. temperature measurements, it is impossible to use any statistical methods to derive an accurate climate trend for the U.S.” said Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Watts, the director of the study. “Data from the stations that have not been corrupted by faulty placement show a rate of warming in the United States reduced by almost half compared to all stations.”

It’s like putting a thermometer in your home to measure the ambient temperature, and then when you buy a wood stove and install it right next to the thermometer, not moving the measuring device to another part of the room.

I’d suggest incompetence, but when the flaws are so obviously designed to support a political theory (which is what modern-day climate “science” has become), we can only call it malfeasance.  As with all things of this nature, the solution is self-evident: