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Breaking News: IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri to face independent inquiry
26
02
2010


Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC Chairman

Excerpts from the Telegraph article

By Geoffrey Lean, in Bali

Rajendra Pachauri, the controversial Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to face an international inquiry into the performance of his organisation.

Environment and Climate ministers meeting in closed session in Bali last night insisted that an independent review should be carried out following the publicising of mistakes in its last report, and a row surrounding Dr Pachauri’s robust response to his critics. If his management is found to be at fault his position could become untenable.

For the past three years, a group of zealous laymen has visited and photographed nearly every one of the weather stations to determine whether they have been placed properly. And what they found is a stunning disregard for the government's own rules: 90 percent of the sensors are too close to potential sources of heat to pass muster, including some very odd sources indeed:

• A sensor in Redding, Calif., is housed in a box that also contains a halogen light bulb, which could emit warmth directly onto the gauge.


• A sensor in Hanksville, Utah, sits directly atop a gravestone, which is not only macabre but also soaks up the sun's heat and radiates it back to the thermometer at night.

• A sensor in Marysville, Calif., sits in a parking lot at a fire station right next to an air conditioner exhaust, a cell phone tower and a barbecue grill.

• A sensor in Tahoe City, Calif., sits near a paved tennis court and is right next to a "burn barrel" that incinerates garbage.

• A sensor in Hopkinsville, Ky., is sheltered from the wind by an adjoining house and sits above an asphalt driveway.

• Dozens of sensors are located at airports and sewage treatment plants, which produce "heat islands" from their sprawling seas of asphalt and heavy emissions.

"So far we've surveyed 1,062 of them," said Anthony Watts, a meteorologist who began the tracking effort in 2007. "We found that 90 percent of them don't meet [the government's] old, simple rule called the '100-foot rule' for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence. Ninety percent of them failed that, and we've got documentation."

Watts, who has posted pictures of the sensors on his Web site, SurfaceStations.org, says he believes that the location of the sensors renders their recorded temperatures inaccurate, which in turn brings some of the data behind global warming theory into question.

adjustments have been made to account for measurable and predictable data biases, such as Time of Observation and station moves, but the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Flight (GISS) who are the main collectors, analyzers, and modelers of climatic data have not done a site by site hands on photographic survey to account for microsite influences near the thermometer. To date all such studies conducted have been data analysis and data manipulations used to spot and/or minimize data inconsistencies.