The Honest Temperature Record
26th August 2023
John Hinderaker at Power Line.
One of the problems with evaluating global warming claims is that the temperature record has been corrupted. Custodians of the various temperature data sets are generally global warming zealots, and they have gone back and changed the temperature records of the past, e.g. by lowering the temperatures that were recorded during the 1930s, to make “climate change” hysteria seem more plausible.
At the same time that records custodians make such dubious “adjustments,” they do nothing to compensate for factors that really do distort the record, pre-eminently the Urban Heat Island Effect. There is no question that weather stations in cities are affected by urban development that increases local temperatures for reasons that have nothing to do with climate. A large part of the increase in temperatures that has been recorded over the last 50 years is due to the Urban Heat Island Effect.