Just last week, congressional Democrats were urging President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency because some Americans were enduring a patch of hot weather. Though more than a bit meshuga, they couldn’t match the fever of Bill Weir. The CNN chief climate correspondent said, also last week, that “the fate of life on earth is at stake” because Washington isn’t doing more to cool the planet.

Yet again, pieces of a puzzle a pre-schooler could put together in a couple of minutes are missing.

One of those lost pieces is the surface temperature record that the climate alarmists tell us is evidence that man is overheating Earth. They treat the record as if it’s irrefutable fact. But it’s not quite that. The reality is the temperature record has “been substantially corrupted,” according to a new study.

“Approximately 96% of U.S. temperature stations fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be ‘acceptable,’ uncorrupted placement,” says former broadcast meteorologist Anthony Watts in a Heartland Institute study. “These findings strongly undermine the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends.”

On his own site, Watts calls the study a followup the the “widespread corruption and heat biases found at NOAA stations in 2009.”

Previously, Watts found that “many climate monitoring stations were located next to exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, located on blistering-hot rooftops, or placed near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat.”

Somehow the “heat-bias distortion problem,” he adds, “is even worse now.”

See Also: Climate Emergency? What A Crock

The stations that Watts audited are part of the National Weather Service’s Cooperative Observer Program. According to the NWS, it is “a network of daily weather observations taken by more than 8,500 volunteers,” and records data, including “observations from the late 1800s,” considered “vital to understanding the U.S. climate.”

According to Watts:

• “Many stations often had missing, incomplete, or erroneous data, perhaps due to the volunteer-based network of observers who could not always record or report data based upon illness, week-day only reporting, and/or vacation days.”
• “Major gaps in the data record were ‘infilled’ with temperature data from nearby sites, compounding errors from other stations that were also non-compliant with station siting requirements.”
• “Changes in the technology of temperature stations over time resulted in many being placed closer to buildings, as well as other heat sinks such as asphalt, concrete, and brick infrastructure. In some cases, official NWS thermometers were moved to parking lots and next to external heat-generating air conditioner units from previously cooler locations that were no longer available for thermometer placement.”
• “The gradual introduction of the MMTS / Nimbus electronic thermometers since their inception in the mid-1980s has likely introduced a slow warming bias. This is due to thermometers being moved closer to buildings, asphalt, concrete, and other man-made influences from older Stevenson Screen and Cotton Region Shelter enclosures.”
• “Nine of every 10 USHCN stations were likely reporting inaccurately high temperatures because they were poorly sited and in violation of NOAA/NWS published standards for thermometer placement.”

Despite these problems and many more, the public has been asked to put its faith in the “science” that looks more everyday like fiction. It has also been asked to trust data from the 19th century, when equipment was far more primitive and the readings in many cases subjective. What looked like 72 degrees to one might look like 73 to another. Or 71. There’s no way the record isn’t distorted.

So, if we don’t know what past temperatures were, how can we know if we are now warming or cooling over the long term? We do know that there has been some warming since the late 1970s, when satellites, the only reliable measure we have, began to record temperatures. But it’s so small that it’s negligible. We also know much of the world is still warming from the Little Ice Age that ended in the late 19th or early 20th century.

We concede that there’s more to our planet than just the U.S. But the corrupted data would have an impact on the global record, because “compared to other countries, the U.S. has more stations,” reports Ars Technica, which also acknowledges there were “issues” in the past in regard to using wooden buckets to scoop up ocean water to check temperatures, “and volunteers scribbling in notebooks.” Moreover, if the U.S., the most developed nation in history, can’t get the data right, why does anyone think other nations can?

We decided long ago that the climate zealots would never back down, no matter that the facts say. Their fanaticism knows no bounds. So all we can do is bring the truth whenever we are able. We see no reason people should live in fear and guilt.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board