Fox Climate Reporting Rates “Pants on Fire” – “Retired Accountant” as Climate Expert February 17, 2015

Birth of a climate denial crock.

PolitiFact:

“They’re (the White House) actually kind of lucky that we don’t cover climate change as much as we should,” Perino said. “Because yesterday, it was reported that the temperature readings have been fabricated and it’s all blowing up in their faces.” Co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle interjected that it was “fraud science” and Perino said, “Yes, I agree.” We have checked this sort of claim before and found it wrong, but some time has passed, and Perino referenced new reporting. So we wanted to fact-check her claim that temperature readings “have been fabricated.” We reached out to Perino to find the source of her statement and did not hear back. However, a couple of days before she spoke, the British paper The Telegraph carried an opinion piece entitled, “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever.”

I, of course covered this last week – but let’s recap.

Not long ago, Paul Homewood, a blogger that Fox News itself describes as “retired accountant, blogger, and self described “climate historian”‘ (that certainly inspires confidence) – posted that he had looked at data from several stations in Paraguay, and that those temperatures had been “adjusted” to bias them toward warming. Rabidly right wing columnist Christopher Booker of the Telegraph newspaper picked this slim reed up and declared it the “Biggest Science Scandal Ever”.

Cue the right wing echo chamber. Here’s one thing that the climate denialist right wing does well. They don’t have many thoughts, but the ones they do have, they repeat and amplify endlessly.



This tactic worked well a few years ago when deployed in the so-called “climate gate” non-scandal, and managed to snooker a number of unwary mainstream media outlets into parroting Limbaugh-esque talking points that confused a lot of people, for a while.

Since then, scientists, and pro-science communicators, have formed a number of alliances – mail groups, blogs, personal and professional networks, and rapid-response teams to bat down disinformation as soon as it starts to circulate, and a certain amount of awareness building has taken place in the mainstream media. It helped that the “climate gate” nonsense turned out to be a hoax of WMD proportions.

The reason this latest kerfuffle has been confined mostly to the Fox News Noise machine and the denial blogosphere speaks to the effectiveness of the science counter measures.

It also speaks to the fact that in the last few years, the Planet itself has been weighing in heavily on the debate. More and more, climate denial talking points end up orbiting in ever tighter circles in the hermetically sealed, impenetrable logic loop of the conspiracy set.

To sum up – yes, adustments are made in data. They can be because a station has moved, or perhaps because a city has grown up around a rural station, or because the daily measuring time has been changed at some point. Sometimes adjustments push temperature trends up, and sometimes down.

Over the long haul, they’ve been a wash.

Factcheck.org:

NOAA maintains about 1,500 monitoring stations, and accumulates data from more than a thousand other stations in countries around the world (many national and international organizations share this type of data freely). There are actually fewer monitoring stations today than there used to be; modern stations have better technology and are accessible in real time, unlike some older outposts no longer in use. The raw, unadjusted data from these stations is available from many sources, including the international collaboration known as the Global Historical Climatology Network and others. As the years go by, all those stations undergo various types of changes: This can include shifts in how monitoring is done, improvements in technology, or even just the addition or subtraction of nearby buildings. For example, a new building constructed next to a monitoring station could cast a shadow over a station, or change wind patterns, in such ways that could affect the readings. Also, the timing of temperature measurements has varied over time. And in the 1980s, most U.S. stations switched from liquid-in-glass to electronic resistance thermometers, which could both cool maximum temperature readings and warm minimum readings. Monitoring organizations like NOAA use data from other stations nearby to try and adjust for these types of issues, either raising or lowering the temperature readings for a given station. This is known as homogenization. The most significant adjustment around the world, according to NOAA, is actually for temperatures taken over the oceans, and that adjustment acts to lower rather than raise the global temperature trend.

Politifact again:

Every month, readings from thousands of land-based weather stations around the world are shared through the Global Historical Climatology Network. To measure ocean temperatures, there is a flow of data from buoys and ships. Climate trends play out over long periods of time, and the challenge has been to deal with changes in the way temperature is measured that have nothing to do with the weather itself. For instance, local officials might move a station from a valley to a nearby hilltop. They might change the time of day when they record their measurements from sunrise to sunset. They might change the kind of thermometer they use. In the ocean, the practice once was to haul up a bucket of water. Later, the standard practice was to measure the temperature from the engine’s intake valve.

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Homewood is right that the Paraguay adjustments raised the temperature reported for that station. But what Homewood leaves out, NOAA says, is that nearly half the time the adjustments made by researchers lower the temperature below what was actually recorded.

Zeke Hausfather of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group tweeted a graph demonstrating this point. This graph shows how little impact adjustments have – showing also that the oldest data is most likely to need adjustment.

The Berkeley Group itself is interesting, because it was formed several years ago specifically to investigate the charges of tampering that were part of the “climate gate” non scandal.

I was part of a team that interviewed Berkeley Lead Scientist Richard Muller on his findings, a few months ago in San Francisco.

Bottom line for Politifact:

The allegations raised by skeptics like the author of The Telegraph item have had no effect on the consensus that the Earth has seen an increase in temperatures over the past 100 years. This claim has been debunked before. To continue to repeat it moves it into the realm of the ridiculous. We rate the claim Pants on Fire.

Finally, Scientist Kevin Cowtan has produced a new, and excellent video, further describing how and why temperature adjustments are made, and inviting anyone to check the scientists work, using several online tools, provided in the video description. Whether you choose to investigate on your own or not, this video is valuable and enlightening.