If you’re a special interest group basing your policy preferences on bad science that needs donor dollars, you must scare people, and a Louisiana media source bought it, hook, line, and sinker.
This year, the group Climate Central put out a report alleging that summers over the past 35 years have warmed in almost all of 243 U.S. cities and that anthropogenic climate change is the leading driver in nearly all of those. Then the group, which prides itself on fronting the fable that anthropogenic causes necessarily have triggered more extreme weather such as rising average temperatures and packages this for local media, snookered the Louisiana Radio Network into swallowing this line for a story about summer temperatures in Louisiana, blaming supposedly higher temperatures on increases in carbon emissions that eventually will lead to doom.
Chasing the story was defensible, given alarmist reporting about temperatures. However, swallowing the bilge whole proved a lapse in judgment.
That’s as a little research would have demonstrated that the report is fatally flawed that renders its conclusions worthless. It relies upon measuring stations severely prone to the Urban Heat Island effect. Basically, the effect comes about from relying upon data gathered at stations particularly prone to picking up microsite data that badly, if at all, captures the actual environment accurately which is possible even a short distance away. This is due to the fact that stations decades ago were placed in areas where continued urban development traps more and more heat. In using average temperatures, both day and night, this tactic (particularly when relying on nighttime numbers because of slowly dissipating trapped localized heat) overestimates actual mean temperatures caused by natural forces. Stations in the same area placed away from artificial heat sources systematically show significantly lower temperatures. Simply, these data mislead.
That doesn’t mean that human activities don’t contribute to rising temperatures – if they have risen at all, the point being these measurements are unreliable to determine even that. What it does mean is assertions such as those in the report can’t be made legitimately. But if flawed data are available that support your mission ….
Yet even the news story, to observant critical thinkers, carries its own seeds of destruction to the narrative being peddled. The group’s source claims that carbon dioxide emissions increases have caused this on the way to catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Yet the national temperature change said to have occurred in urban areas since 1970 was 2.5 degrees while in Louisiana’s since 1895 it has been 1.4 degrees.
But hasn’t there been an enormous increase in carbon output by the U.S. in that span, 200 times a 3 percent national increase in temperature as measured in the study; in fact, output has declined 20 percent in the past two decades? And why would Louisiana cities, with the state especially prone to carbon output, lag the nation’s urban centers in increase by some 40 percent or more? These inconsistencies illuminate the fact that much more prominent factors – some influenced by man such as conservationist strategies, others not so such as sunspot activity – account for the lion’s share in understanding temperature changes, or otherwise there would be much greater association between carbon output and temperature change.
So, the whole story is garbage in, garbage out. And let’s hope LRN and other state media outlets – if they are committed to fair and unbiased searches for the truth of things – do a better job of separating the wheat from the chaff.
No comments:
Post a Comment