Now it turns out that the homogenization itself is suspect and also producing way too much warming. Anthony Watts, a prominent climate blogger without any external financial support, revealed this in a blockbuster presentation at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, a few days before Christmas. Along with three colleagues, he may have invalidated much of the warming in recent years in the U.S. temperature history from our National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
For years, Watts and a team of volunteers set about to photograph, or obtain photos or satellite imagery, of just about every weather station that forms NOAA’s “Historical Climate Network” (HCN), which our government claims was pretty much free of nagging problems like temperature sensors being close to parking lots or, even worse, heat sources like air-conditioning exhaust.
It turns out they weren’t, and after assiduously poring over all the pictures, Watts and his crew classified the stations into two general groups, well-sited, “compliant” stations, and poorly-sited “non-compliant” ones. From the compliant group, Watts’ team further selected only those stations which had no changes whatsoever in location or observation timing during their analysis period, 1979–2008, leaving 92 of the best quality stations distributed across the U.S.