Global temperature data plagued by serious errors

April 18, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

GISS & METAR – dial “M” for missing minus signs: it’s worse than we thought
By Anthony Watts

17 04 2010

Here’s a story about how one missing letter, an M, can wreck a whole month’s worth of climate data. It is one of the longest posts ever made on WUWT [wattsupwiththat.com], I spent almost my entire Saturday on it. I think it might also be one of the most important because it demonstrates a serious weakness in surface data reporting….(Full Story)
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The report by Anthony Watts is about serious and copious errors in the surface temperature-reporting data for the whole world.

One may think that those errors do not matter all that much, but that would be wrong. The errors all cause false reporting of substantially higher temperatures at high latitudes and are quite possibly the reason why global warming alarmists are consistently led to report excessive warming of the Arctic and of the Antarctic, while in reality much lower temperatures were actually measured in each case of false reporting.

That is very bad and seriously damages the accuracy and credibility of global temperature reporting.  It is much worse yet that it may well be impossible to correct the numerous and serious errors that occurred.

However, a bad piece of news often has a good side to it.  The good side of the news in this case is that the existence of the errors proves that quality control measures for global climate data are not only absent but need to be implemented.

The recognition of a problem cause is a vital and first major step for the successful elimination of the problem cause.

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