NOAA AND GISS CHERRY-PICKED WEATHER STATIONS IN CANADA

CANWEST: Temperature data skewed: researchers

Call it the mystery of the missing thermometers.

Two months after "climategate" cast doubt on some of the science behind global warming, new questions are being raised about the reliability of a key temperature database used by the United Nations and climate change scientists as proof of recent planetary warming.

Two American researchers allege that U.S. government scientists have skewed global temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada.

In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.

The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada.

Yet as American researchers Joseph D'Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, point out in a study published on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute, NOAA uses "just one thermometer [for measuring] everything north of latitude 65 degrees."

... Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), have not only reduced the number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have "cherry picked" the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea-- which has a warming effect on winter weather.

RUSSIANS SAY THEY DID THIS WITH THE WEATHER STATIONS IN RUSSIA.

AGW = BS.