The Arctic is Warming or Where are the Temperature Stations to Prove It?

The idiot Al Gore claimed, today, in the NYTs, that global warming is real science, and among other things, the Arctic is melting:

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea. Link

So, Al Gore tells us the Arctic is melting. So does NASA:

See this article for an explanation as to how the map above was created by NASA (In a nutshell, it uses multiple sources, including ground stations and satellites).

As an example, let’s look at Victoria Island, in Canada, which just happens to be in the “melting” Arctic.

As you can see, Victoria Island falls neatly into the Arctic.

So let’s go to NASA’s GISS site, which provided the nifty map, above, showing a “warmer” Arctic and a warmer Victoria Island.

Simply to the Goddard site at NASA and clicked on Victoria Island. In this case, I picked the northern most part of it:

Once you do that, you get a list of stations that are supposed to measure temperatures for the island.

click to enlarge

Does anything jump out at you? First, the closest weather station from the spot I click, in this case 72.6 N by 111.0 W, is 311 km away (multiply kilometers by .62 to give you miles). GISS uses stations up to 1030 km away to measure temperatures on Victoria Island!

Maybe that math works, maybe it doesn’t, but I know temperatures in Dayton Ohio are different from those in Cincinnati, and both are surely different from readings in Cleveland.

Beyond that point, look at the station list above. The earliest temperature readings were begun in 1937. Can anyone draw any conclusions about Arctic temperatures from only a sample of 73 years?

Look at the station list one more time, what else do you notice? How about the fact that the last temperature reading for Victoria Island, in the Arctic, was from 2008 and that most of the other stations dropped out in the late 1980s. Once again, how can you draw any inferences from so few samples?

One last question, how do we know the temperatures for this corner of the Arctic if the last measuring station closed in 2008?

If one switched from ground stations to satellites, that is different data and long term inferences, by definition would be suspect if different methods were treated equally.

If the inputs are flawed, then what of the results? The science isn’t settled, because the science hasn’t even been properly done.