In the Wall Street Journal Paul Glader picks up news, circulated via press release from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Observatory, on a thermometer that has been in one place, at the end of a pier sticking out into a lake, for more than a century.  The researchers who use it for meteorological data salute it as a paragon of fixity – one instrument, one place, one environment, for all that time. Ergo, pretty good spot to see if baseline temperatures are changing or not.

Glader’s lede: “Weather experts are tangling over a 114-year-old thermometer at the Mohonk Preserve, New York’s largest nonprofit nature preserve.” Does this not imply that there is a schism among genuine authorities? I think yes. Does the story reveal such a schism? I think not.

The only person he quotes as suspicious of the instrument’s neutrality  is none other than Anthony Watts, a former television meteorologist best known now as the presider over his cleverly-named website, Watts Up with That.

Watts is among the more prominent and insistent bloggers among those convinced that anthropogenic global warming is a big fat mistake, lie, fraud, or all three. This thermometer’s data say the temperature has risen fairly steadily in recent history. Watts is active in circles determined to show that weather stations in general are NOT the places to get data on long term temperature changes because urbanization and other factors may have misleadingly led their surrounding temperatures to go up whether the globe is warming overall, or not. And he looks fishy-eyed at the thermometer the people at Lamont like so much.

Watts tells Glader that the temperature measuring box at the lake is too close to the ground (not clear if that means the deck of the pier or what), and that this is not optimal. Why this makes it miss a trend, given that it has not moved, is not explained. He also suspects that children dump Pepsi into and pee into the device. Maybe that’s a joke. It’s funny enough. But other than a few enigmatic comments about a house with a chimney, if he said anything serious about why the thermometer might have delivered a systematically erroneous signal, it’s not evident in this story.

CORRECTION: Oops on my own part. The thermometer is on shore, the pier has the station rain gauge.  / CP

So if you want to read a story in which the reporter does a diligent and extensive job checking to see if a press release got things right rather than depend on somebody from outside the ranks of pertinent science and devoted up front to discrediting mainstream climate science, look elsewhere.

Grist for the Mill: Earth Institute, Columbia University Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 6th, 2010 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.