How Not to Measure Temperature

Over at Watts Up With That? is a collection of hilarious pictures of official U.S. Weather Service temperature monitoring stations, and after you look at some of them, you can see why the data that comes from them is showing global warming. A number of the thermometers are located within a few feet of air conditioning exhaust fans, another is sitting at the end of a jet runway--literally dozens of feet from jet exhausts. Here's one that is located next to a trash burning barrel! And my all-time favorite:

First site is the Lodi Municipal Service Center, 38.11619N 121.29003W. FYI, Lodi runs their own municipal district, which is why they own a substation. Note the bank of fans on the big transformer. they are about 30 feet away. I wasn't about to get close enough to the transformers to measure for sure. The fans exhaust the waste heat the transformer produces. Note that when temperatures are at their highest, so is electrical energy use for air conditioning. And of course, our thermometer will track this trend.

Garbage in, garbage out.

I've mentioned before that there have long been concerns that the thermometers in urban areas are warming up because urban areas have lots of concrete (which turns sunlight into heat for hours afterwards), and because population growth in urban areas creates artificially warm microclimates. These examples are pretty persuasive that this is indeed a serious problem--and some of the graphs, such as the one for this station in Tahoe City, are so dramatic that you can pretty well guess when the trash burning barrel was placed five feet from the thermometer.