Fox Climate Reporting Rates "Pants on Fire" – "Retired Accountant" as Climate Expert February 17, 2015

Birth of a climate denial crock.

PolitiFact:

"They're (the White House) actually kind of lucky that we don't cover climate change as much as we should," Perino said. "Because yesterday, it was reported that the temperature readings have been fabricated and it's all blowing up in their faces." Co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle interjected that it was "fraud science" and Perino said, "Yes, I agree." We have checked this sort of claim before and found it wrong, but some time has passed, and Perino referenced new reporting. So we wanted to fact-check her claim that temperature readings "have been fabricated." We reached out to Perino to find the source of her statement and did not hear back. However, a couple of days before she spoke, the British paper The Telegraph carried an opinion piece entitled, "The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever."

I, of course covered this last week – but let's recap.

Not long ago, Paul Homewood, a blogger that Fox News itself describes as "retired accountant, blogger, and self described "climate historian"' (that certainly inspires confidence) – posted that he had looked at data from several stations in Paraguay, and that those temperatures had been "adjusted" to bias them toward warming. Rabidly right wing columnist Christopher Booker of the Telegraph newspaper picked this slim reed up and declared it the "Biggest Science Scandal Ever".

Cue the right wing echo chamber. Here's one thing that the climate denialist right wing does well. They don't have many thoughts, but the ones they do have, they repeat and amplify endlessly.


This tactic worked well a few years ago when deployed in the so-called "climate gate" non-scandal, and managed to snooker a number of unwary mainstream media outlets into parroting Limbaugh-esque talking points that confused a lot of people, for a while.

Since then, scientists, and pro-science communicators, have formed a number of alliances – mail groups, blogs, personal and professional networks, and rapid-response teams to bat down disinformation as soon as it starts to circulate, and a certain amount of awareness building has taken place in the mainstream media. It helped that the "climate gate" nonsense turned out to be a hoax of WMD proportions.

The reason this latest kerfuffle has been confined mostly to the Fox News Noise machine and the denial blogosphere speaks to the effectiveness of the science counter measures.

It also speaks to the fact that in the last few years, the Planet itself has been weighing in heavily on the debate. More and more, climate denial talking points end up orbiting in ever tighter circles in the hermetically sealed, impenetrable logic loop of the conspiracy set.

To sum up – yes, adustments are made in data. They can be because a station has moved, or perhaps because a city has grown up around a rural station, or because the daily measuring time has been changed at some point. Sometimes adjustments push temperature trends up, and sometimes down.

Over the long haul, they've been a wash.

Factcheck.org:

NOAA maintains about 1,500 monitoring stations, and accumulates data from more than a thousand other stations in countries around the world (many national and international organizations share this type of data freely). There are actually fewer monitoring stations today than there used to be; modern stations have better technology and are accessible in real time, unlike some older outposts no longer in use. The raw, unadjusted data from these stations is available from many sources, including the international collaboration known as the Global Historical Climatology Network and others. As the years go by, all those stations undergo various types of changes: This can include shifts in how monitoring is done, improvements in technology, or even just the addition or subtraction of nearby buildings. For example, a new building constructed next to a monitoring station could cast a shadow over a station, or change wind patterns, in such ways that could affect the readings. Also, the timing of temperature measurements has varied over time. And in the 1980s, most U.S. stations switched from liquid-in-glass to electronic resistance thermometers, which could both cool maximum temperature readings and warm minimum readings. Monitoring organizations like NOAA use data from other stations nearby to try and adjust for these types of issues, either raising or lowering the temperature readings for a given station. This is known as homogenization. The most significant adjustment around the world, according to NOAA, is actually for temperatures taken over the oceans, and that adjustment acts to lower rather than raise the global temperature trend.

Politifact again:

Every month, readings from thousands of land-based weather