Son of Climategate! Scientist says feds manipulated data

From WorldNetDaily

Reporting points in coldest regions simply eliminated by U.S. agencies By Bob Unruh Posted: January 16, 2010 ~ 12:20 am Eastern © 2010 WorldNetDaily In a one-two series of Climategate aftershocks that assuredly will further rattle the global warming community, a report has been issued by U.S. researchers accusing government agencies of cherry-picking temperature readings used to assess global temperatures, and a series of embarrassing e-mails were released revealing what happened when a blogger dared to point out a mistake by NASA climate scientists. The new report is from scientist Joseph D'Aleo and was highlighted in a report on global warming on KUSI television in San Diego. It comes only weeks after the tumultuous climategate e-mail scandal in Britain erupted, proving top global warming scientists manipulated data there. The report from D'Aleo, a retired climatologist who has been skeptical of global warming, contends climate data has been corrupted and skewed by "urbanization and other local factors such as land-use-land-cover changes and improper siting." He blamed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which he described as "seriously complicit in data manipulation and fraud." The East Anglia e-mail leak focused on the work at the Climate Research Unit there, but the director there has confirmed "almost all the data" in the archive "is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center," D'Aleo said. But he noted that an analysis by San Jose computer programmer E.M. Smith of the data "found they systematically eliminated 75 percent of the world's stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations." "The thermometers in a sense marched towards the tropics, the sea and to airport tarmacs," he said. For example, the report said the number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35 with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations plummeted. Further, a vast majority of the climate stations reporting in the U.S. were either poorly or very poorly sited, taking temperature readings from paved driveways, in a waste treatment facility, on rooftops or near the exhaust from idling jet engines, rather than in open areas. Stations in such locations as the Andes and Bolivia have virtually vanished, meaning that temperatures for those areas now are "determined by interpolation from stations hundreds of miles away on the coast or in the Amazon." "[Think] of it this way," D'Aleo told the television station, "if Minneapolis and other northern cities suddenly disappeared but Kansas City and St. Louis were still available, would you think an average of Kansas City and St. Louis would provide an accurate replacement for Minneapolis and expect to use that to determine how Minneapolis' temperature has changed with any hope of accuracy?" D'Aleo said that the coolest stations in a particular reporting period sometimes disappeared in the next. "This would indicate a deliberate attempt to create a warm bias on the part of NOAA because in calculating the average temperatures in this way it would ensure that the global average temperature for each month and year would now show a positive temperature anomaly," the report said. Such anomalies, it added, make climate reports based on those figures simply unreliable. READ FULL STORY >