This is a profound level of spin on the climate change debacle. Environment Canada says that climate scientists who track global temperature data may be underestimating the amount of warming in the Canadian Arctic, because they are working from data samples that are few and far between.
In Canada the number of stations dropped from 600 to 35 in 2009. The percentage of stations in the lower elevations (below 300 feet) tripled and those at higher elevations above 3000 feet were reduced in half. Canada’s semi-permanent depicted warmth comes from interpolating from more southerly locations to fill northerly vacant grid boxes, even as a pure average of the available stations shows a COOLING. Just 1 thermometer remains for everything north of latitude 65N – that station is Eureka. Eureka according to Wikipedia has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to the flora and fauna abundant around the Eureka area, more so than anywhere else in the High Arctic. Winters are frigid but summers are slightly warmer than at other places in the Canadian Arctic.
From this decline in resources to properly extrapolate temperature readings, Environment Canada concludes that while a smaller sample of stations may not prevent a clear understanding of global temperature change, it could be a problem for the Arctic.
“Missing observations in an area where the climate is expected to respond more quickly to external influences, such as the Arctic, may, however, result in underestimates of the amount of climatic change,” Environment Canada told Canwest News Service on Friday.
Really? Couldn’t it also “overestimate” the amount of climatic change, using the exact same logic? I mean, if we have a single reliable observation station for the entire Arctic region in Canada, isn’t it possible that we’re not getting a very controlled sense of temperature changes?
Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in one of the infamous emails extracted from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit database, that a smaller sampling of weather stations in the Canadian Arctic wouldn’t have a significant impact on the data.
He said any long-term temperature changes recorded at the high Arctic station at Eureka, would likely be “representative” of changes elsewhere in the region, even in a sub-Arctic city like Yellowknife.
“Temperature anomalies don’t vary that much from one (nearby) station to another,” he said. “You don’t need thousands of stations across Canada to know what the monthly anomalies are.”
Which is sort of like saying that if it’s -1 in Winnipeg, it has to be the same temperature across the millions of square kilometres around the station.
Meanwhile, the United Nations took some time off from apologizing over their shoddy “consensus” research on glacier melting, to lecture Canada about doing a better job on climate change. Which is sort of like Mark McGwire lecturing Sammy Sosa on steroid use.
