The next target of mainstream media propaganda is to convince the public that human industry is causing climate change. CNN insiders boasted about that to James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas on hidden camera (after bragging about defeating Donald Trump’s re-election).

Marjorie Taylor Greene is preparing to debate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Some of us will worry whether the debate about the Green New Deal will focus on the most important points. There are a thousand issues and sub-issues. It is easy to get lost or sidetracked.

I suggest laying the axe to the root: Humans have never actually measured the temperature of planet Earth. Let’s just start with that.

Is the Earth getting warmer, cooler, or staying the same? Without knowing the planet’s overall temperature, we cannot say.

Weather stations were never intended to measure global temperatures. They were designed and installed to assist ships and airplanes with navigation – not to measure the Earth on a planetary scale. The limits of scientific measurements must be kept in mind. There are approximately 10,000 localized weather stations at fixed locations on land, and around 2,000 marine buoys and mobile stations.

Scientist Richard Courtney points out (including to the UK Parliament Select Committee) that there is no agreed definition of a global temperature. Furthermore, we would have to calibrate the measurement method against a standard which really isn’t possible. The modern world has forgotten that measurement instruments must be calibrated. You can’t just grab an instrument and measure something. It must be validated for quality and calibrated to a standard.

This requirement used to be so well-established that our U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress to set standards for weights and measurements. The U.S. Government has always included an office under various names for establishing common standards.

How could we measure the planet? Politicians and journalists understand that statistics require random sampling, which is commonly used in public opinion surveys. We cannot predict how roughly 153 million registered voters are going to vote in an election by sampling only about 1,000 to 1,500 people unless the sample is truly random. We must follow strict statistical methodologies for taking samples smaller than the total population.

Temperature measurements at fixed locations cannot predict the Earth as a whole. The Earth’s surface is 196.9 million square miles. It is a sphere 24,901 miles in circumference. The surface is 70% oceans and lakes and vast, mostly untraveled oceans like the Pacific or Southern Atlantic or the Arctic Sea. Fatal flaw number one is that people cannot grasp how truly gigantic Earth is.

What if we actually measured the planet’s temperature? Of the Earth’s 196.9 million square miles, let’s say measuring a 20-mile by 20-mile area is more meaningful than every 1 square mile. So, the data set’s population is 492,250 measurements. A new sample, newly randomized, would have to be selected randomly each and every time someone measures Earth’s temperature.

The size of a random sample determines the margin of error. If we used a smaller sample size, the uncertainty would swamp the small temperature changes that the hypothesis is predicting over decades. The numbers would bounce around from year to year because of the small sample size, not because the Earth’s climate is actually changing.

Using a handy statistics calculator, we might have to randomly select 18,095 locations – different each time – to get a 0.85% margin of error at a confidence level of 98%. That means that if the global temperature is in the vicinity of 59 degrees Fahrenheit, the margin of error would be half a degree. But we are trying to track tiny changes year by year, so a sample size of 48,897 areas would be more meaningful, producing a margin of error of 3/10ths of a degree at a 98% confidence.

Measurements would have to be taken on the same day, at the same time of day. This is because weather travels. When a violent cold front roars through, the temperature can drop 10 to 20 degrees in less than a day. Unless the measurements are taken at the same time on the same day, the result will be meaningless, because weather systems are always moving around the surface.

This could be done. Mobile weather stations could be airdropped – even by parachute – to randomly-selected locations. The Earth’s overall temperature could be sampled, say, once a year. Collect the small stations and use them again next year. The stations would get re-used.

Official, NOAA-approved weather stations are available as small, compact, automated designs, either standing on tripods or mounted on pipes in the ground. Amateur versions are listed at around a thousand dollars. Out of the billions being spent on climate science, $500 million could purchase standalone automated devices. The major expense would be transporting them to remote locations once a year and retrieving them. Showing the right way to measure the Earth helps illustrate how it has never been done before.

Image used with permission from Watts Up With That. 

Many existing weather stations are at airports. As aircraft changed from propeller planes to jets, and flights began taking off and landing every five to ten minutes, the jet engine exhaust raised temperatures around the airports. Some temperature stations are directly in the path of jet engine exhaust. One station is next to the BBQ grill in the parking lot of a fire department. Others sit next to the heat exhaust of giant air conditioner units.

Image used with permission from Watts Up With That. 

Airports were often built way out in the countryside. But over the decades, suburban sprawl has seen buildings and asphalt grow around the airports. Changed readings are measuring the changing environment of urban and suburban construction surrounding the airports. We are measuring the expansion of asphalt, which creates “urban heat islands” and “heat island effects” – not planetary changes.

Image used with permission from Watts Up With That. 

Concerning satellites, it would take a long discussion to explain the problems. review hyperlinkslet’s start with the fact that the first LANDSAT satellites were not launched until the 1970s, so it’s a temporally small data set. Also, satellites are not in contact with the atmosphere and do not measure temperature. They measure infrared radiation at the upper atmosphere, at the edge of space. Then we guess. We guess that IR radiation is (always) correlated with surface temperature, even after traveling through a couple of hundred miles of the atmosphere.

If we don’t have a single temperature reading for the entire planet for today, how can we say if the planet is getting warmer or cooler or not changing at all? We cannot talk about the temperature in, say, Geneva or London or New York City only. Isolated cities do not attest to the Earth’s temperate changes.

Another fatal flaw in climate alarmism is the failure to understand that air moves. Air is made of gases, which, by definition, flow freely. Alarmists try to evoke the image of carbon dioxide as a blanket. But carbon dioxide is not nailed in place. It is free to move. Blankets work because they do not move.

The atmosphere is in constant motion. When warmed, all gases move upwards towards outer space. When CO2 absorbs heat, it rises. Convection transports heat from the surface up to the thin air where jet airplanes cruise. Heat is radiated from there out into space.

The idea that humans are changing Earth’s climate in a way that endangers us is fear porn. (We are told to fear both floods and droughts from a warmer, moister, rain forest like Earth.)

For some reason, some people (not me) would pay real money (back when we still had movie theaters) to watch horror movies that scare them. Apparently, some people are addicted to the adrenaline rush of getting scared. For that reason, climate alarmists will fight ferociously to make us believe that humans are guilty and we must atone for our sins by sacrificing.

IMAGE: Earth’s temperature by A. Widburg, using public domain images.

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