One of my favorite stories to tell over this topic. In the early 1990s....I was a avid jogger while based in Tucson, AZ. I used to jog the whole block around Reid Park on the southern side of Tucson, roughly a three-mile run.
At the end, where 22nd Street and South Alvernon Way meet....it’s a four-way street on both avenues. ALL asphalt. About seventy-five feet away from that corner, on a pile of bedrocks is a concrete platform for an official weather station trailer. It’s got an air conditioner on one corner of it and at least ten different measuring devices for wind, temperature, rain, etc. The temperature gauge, based on my best guess is within four feet of the air conditioner.
Between the asphalt, the rocks, the concrete, the AC unit’s hot air, the aluminium trailer itself....I’d guess the temperature reading to be a minimum of three degrees higher than what it ought to be if it were two hundred feet away just on regular grass or sand.
Accurate readings? No....whoever put it at this corner....had zero knowledge of proper positioning. It was a national weather service property, and I’d question if they knew anything about their supposed career study area. I’m not a rocket scientist....but this would have been the absolutely wrong place to place it, unless your agenda was to show continued high temperatures for this area of Tucson, for some special purpose.
I admit....Tucson is extra hot in the summer. But the plain truth is....it’s listed on the national news from that Reid Park site, and that temperature is really three-to-five degrees higher than it really is.
Before the debate about the meaning of a pile of numbers can begin:
1. Where are the scientific equipment calibration certification documents for each and every sensor used to derive said numbers over the time span of the collection sampling?
2. Are all the calibration certifications verifiable and not possible to be altered by any source once the certifications are sealed? Again, chain of custody.
3. For the data from these calibrated sensors, demonstrate the chain of custody that is unalterable from the sensor, its time and date, to the output final documents (charts, graphs, tables). The data must be verifiable as unchanged, accurate and true by any and all that investigate the data. This includes surprise inspections.
If workers are required to work under these condition inside a nuke plant (and they are) why should data that supposedly affects the entire Earth in one way or another not be held to the same scrutiny?
When I was growing up in Tucson, it was a much cooler place. Most summer days hit 102 or 103. Now it will hit 110+. Why?
When I was young, there were entire 1 sq mile parcels of empty land inside the city. In a number of places, there would be a subdivision occupying 1/4 of a 1 sq mile parcel of land, with 3/4 empty. 2-story buildings were rare, and building above 3 stories almost nonexistent (except in the immediate downtown).
Now, it has filled in. The streets are 3 lanes in each direction instead of one. There is very little empty land. Subdivisions are now built with houses touching each other instead of with large backyards.
Yet somehow it is CO2 making Tucson hotter, and not the huge population increase and all the buildings...
I now live out in Vail. We are about 1000 feet higher (and about 20 miles from where I grew up). Our typical summer highs are 99-101. A thousand feet higher, and 10 deg cooler - does that sound like a normal temperature gradient?