Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? Dr. David Evans thinks so.

Dr. David Evans has come out with a report that the climate establishment is corrupt.

Here's a snippet from the introductory text of the report:

Only a Fool Would Ignore the Message in the Pattern

Once one or two major news outlets start printing these photos of official thermometers near artificial heating sources, and point out the deception, the rush will be on for our elected representatives to abandon the Global Warming Crusade. No one wants to be seen to be taken in by half-truths and shameless deception. Who wants to look gullible because they didn’t ask the obvious burning questions?

~snip~

These photos speak for themselves. The corruption of climate science has become so blatant, so obvious, that even non-scientists can no longer throw their hands in the air and say “I didn’t know”. You don’t need a PhD to know it is cheating to place thermometers near artificial heat sources and call it “global warming”.

Where's the beef? it appears that a very high significant percentage of the U.S. thermometers used to measure temperatures are situated in ways that are likely to skew readings upwards:

Anthony Watts, a 25-year broadcast meteorology veteran recruited 650 volunteers to inspect and document the 1,221 land-based thermometers overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the USA. Of the 860 thermometers inspected by early 2009, 89% fail to meet the official siting requirements because they are too close to an artificial source of heat (including artificial sources of reflected or radiated heat).

The paper contains photos of badly-situated temperature monitoring stations. And you can find more photos on surfacestations.org.

Some have argued that the urban heat island (UHI) effect is a major contributing factor for observed temperature increases over the last century or so. If heating is mainly localized to urban centers, is that really 'global warming'?

I'm not so sure of the conclusions in the report - it's hard to know motive. And it's good to keep in mind Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I don't know if the climate establishment is intentionally 'cheating' but it does make me wonder just how reliable land-based temperature readings are. It would be interesting to know just how much these land-based readings affect the climate models' calculations.

You can download the full PDF here:
Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt?

(Via: WUWT)