Socrates Paradox

Reviews of the Global Climatic Data Center show that the number of stations used to calculate global average temperatures has decreased from a peak of over 6000 in the 1950’s to 1990’s  to less than 1500 in 2009.  Surprisingly, this resulted in an increase in the calculated global average temperatures.   It has been pointed out by numerous sources that the stations omitted are those from higher elevations, rural locations and higher latitudes, all of which tend to show cooler temperatures.  The position of NCDC on their website is that a large number of paper records were collected and these were manually entered into the system.  Eventually the records from these stations will be entered. 

 The NOAA website at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/temperature-monitoring.html states, “The result of all these efforts is that GHCN has data for many thousands of stations in the period from the 1950s to the 1990s that cannot be routinely updated, thus the number of stations drops considerably in recent years.” 

Zeke Hausfather, at http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2010/01/kusi-noaa-nasa/

Quotes from a paper by Thomas Peterson and Russell Vose:

“The reasons why the number of stations in GHCN drop off in recent years are because some of GHCN’s source datasets are retroactive data compilations (e.g., World Weather Records) and other data sources were created or exchanged years ago. Only three data sources are available in near-real time.”

Hausfather goes on to state, “It’s common to think of temperature stations as modern Internet-linked operations that instantly report temperature readings to readily accessible databases, but that is not particularly accurate for stations outside of the United States and Western Europe. For many of the world’s stations, observations are still taken and recorded by hand, and assembling and digitizing records from thousands of stations worldwide is burdensome.”

Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate (#691) states, “There has been no deliberate reduction in temperature stations, rather the change over time is simply a function of how the data set was created in the first place (from 31 different datasets, only 3 of which update in real time).”  The “real time” statement is a red herring, as some are uploaded daily or even monthly and can easily be accessed over the web. 

A graph of the decline in surface stations along with another explanation is shown at: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/

But their explanations are all lies!  Russia complained that only 25% of the stations that they submitted were used.  In Canada, the number of stations was reduced from 600 in the1970’s to 35 in 2009.  There are 20 stations in Bolivia that have data online available from NOAA, but none of them are used. In California, only 4 stations are now used, San Francisco, Santa Maria, Los Angeles and San Diego.  These 4 coastal sites are hardly representative of the varied geography of California. Our government’s claim that the data is not available is simply not true.  It is available online from the very agency, NOAA that says it is not available.

What is not clear is the stations used in each annual report.  If anyone has access to that list, could you please let me know.