They’re wrong if they aren’t telling you what the truth is. I find it difficult to believe that they are as you say all placed “strategically” when its more likely that they were all placed in spots that were chosen by their owners for whatever purpose instead of these so-called climate researchers, who apparently only just figured out that the placement of the sensors might introduce some bias into their huge database of data.
There is some indication that, if sensors position were not explicitly chosen, which sensors are used in their models were “cherrypicked”.
Like Mann using ONE siberian tree for his treering data because it fit his model the best. Reasonable researchers would have RSSed or averaged many tree’s ring patterns and reported what the results were.
Yes. I don’t dispute that the owners of the devices had legitimate reasons to place them there, or that urban sprawl got to them over time. But it is disturbing and smacks of deliberate fraud that such a simple fact was allowed to introduce bias in the data.