CHURCHVILLE, VA—My neighbor, physicist Edward Long, is afraid our temperature records have been falsified to support the man-made global warming scare. e;He’s afraid HDr. Long recently chose two sets of U.S. meteorological stations from the master list offered by the National Climate Data Center. One data set was rural, one urban. Each had a site in each of the lower 48 states. From the 1890s to 2006, the urban set of measurements showed an increase of 0.72 degrees—but the rural set showed only 0.11 degrees of warming.

 

The vast majority of America is rural, and our cities obviously create their own “heat islands” with masses of cement, brick, and blacktop. Thus, the U.S. temperature record should logically show a true temperature gain that is close to the low rural increase of 0.11 degrees C. In fact, NCDC record shows an overall U.S. temperature increase of 0.69 degrees C.

 

Ed Long says on the American Thinker blog, “The NCDC’s massaging—they call it ‘adjusting’—has resulted in an increase in the rural values, from a raw value of 0.11C/century to an adjusted value of 0.58C/century, and no change in the urban values. . . . This is the exact opposite of any rational consideration, given the increase in the size and activities within urban locations—unless deception is the goal.”  

 

The warming alarmists embedded in our government-sponsored research units have already wasted billions of dollars to endlessly run misleading computerized “climate models.” They have come close to bankrupting our society through the forced substitution of costly, erratic solar and wind power for coal, oil, and natural gas while we refuse to authorize new nuclear facilities. Next would come the job losses, as U.S. industries shut down due to high energy costs or flee to Third World countries with no energy taxes.

 

Now we find that the man-made global warming record, which has supposedly triggered all of this, is “supported” by government-manipulated temperature records:

 

• The Russians say Britain’s East Anglia University officially deleted most of the thermometer sites scattered across Russia’s vast hinterlands—because the readings didn’t show global warming.

 

• New Zealand’s official record shows a major warming in the 20^th century, but none of its weather sites shows that warming trend.

 

• Veteran meteorologist Joe D’Aleo of Icecap recently charged, on John Coleman’s KUSI-TV special, that the U.S. temperature record has been similarly corrupted over the years, weeding out non-warming weather sites. .

 

• James Goodridge, then California State Climatologist,  published a peer-reviewed report in 1992 that found California’s urban counties had experienced a strong warming, the suburban counties a moderate warming, and the rural counties no warming at all.

 

We’ve been enthralled by the Green Wave of guilt and redemption. I recently reminded in a column that the 1995 IPCC report claimed a “human fingerprint on our warming” with no credible scientific to support it—and no such scientific support has since been proffered. An NIH physician who believes in man-made warming looked at this column and said, “What do I care about a 14-year-old report?” 

 

Heavily-taxed energy will double and triple the real costs for everything we buy. Look for food costs to soar five-fold as nitrogen fertilizer—made with natural gas—is forced out of the farm economy. Steel will have too big a “carbon footprint” so the steelmakers and manufacturing will be in China and India. Yet there is only a 22 percent correlation between our global warming record and the rise of human-emitted CO₂ in the 20^th century. The correlation with sunspots is 79 percent.

 

The government-sponsored climate research community—for whatever reasons—has apparently betrayed us.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net