New Analysis Shows Population Density Is Corrupting U.S. Temperature Record

The same organizations and people that launched the climate scare back in the 1980s -NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies – are also the keepers of the data that validate or invalidate their premise. It’s a lot like the old “fox guarding the hen-house” scenario where there isn’t enough separation to ensure objective science. I question the validity of the data. Back in 2009, in conjunction with Heartland, I published Is The U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?

When that was published, it created a firestorm of criticism of just how bad the “official” temperature record is, because I found that approximately 90% of the weather stations in the U.S. are compromised by urban influences affecting their measurements. In December 2015, I demonstrated at the American Geophysical Union convention that the long term temperature trends from these compromised stations were significantly higher than stations that were properly maintained and this was backed up by a NOAA experiment and study published in 2019 that showed poor weather station siting leads to artificial long-term warming.

Now, yet another piece of evidence that supports that premise has come to light. In an article published on his website, climate scientist Dr. Roy Spencer suggests U.S. Warming Trends could be largely spurious.

In his analysis, Dr. Spencer examined another dataset maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and found that when adjusted for population density, weather stations used to measure climate trends report lower long term temperature trends:

“… the highest population density stations had ~0.25 C/decade warming trend, with a reduced warming trend as population density was reduced…”

He adds:

“Significantly, extrapolating to zero population density would give essentially no warming in the United States during 1973-2011. As we shall see (below) official temperature datasets say this period had a substantial warming trend, consistent with the warming in the highest population density locations.

How can one explain this result other than, at least for the period 1973-2011, (1) spurious warming occurred at the higher population density stations, and (2) the evidence supports essentially no warming if there were no people (zero population density) to modify the microclimate around thermometer sites?

I am not claiming there has been no global warming (whatever the cause). I am claiming that there is evidence of spurious warming in thermometer data which must be removed.”

And, this correlation between population density and temperature trend was also identified back in 1996 by James Goodridge, who found the exact same effect in California by examining county population vs. weather station temperature trends. Goodridge published a peer-reviewed paper on the topic in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. His graph drives the point home clearly:

Source: James D. Goodridge Comments on Regional Simulations of Greenhouse Warming Including Natural Variability , 1996, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Clearly, greater population density affects long-term temperature trends. This Urban Heat Island effect (UHI) has been identified and proven time and again, yet official government temperature record-keepers don’t want to acknowledge or properly address the issue. This latest analysis by Dr. Spencer suggests the government record-keepers are failing to properly address the issue and are likely adding to the error  through a series of poorly thought-out statistical manipulations.

With mounting evidence that corrupted data is giving a false warming signal, it is time for NOAA, NASA, and other government science agencies to clean up their bad data and present more accurate, non-heat biased, temperature records.