The relationship between global warming and heat waves is hardly confusing or complicated: CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere, we feel that heat. Nevertheless, Anthony Watts and Koch-political-operative-who-plays-a-reporter Michael Bastasch teamed up yesterday to try and gaslight Los Angeles into thinking its record-breaking heat wasn’t record-breaking.
The argument, first presented by Watts at WUWT then repackaged by Bastasch (and tweeted by Drudge) is that each of the half-dozen or so temperature stations which recorded record-high temperatures in Southern California can’t be trusted. Since these stations exist in cities with cars and on rooftops with A/C units and at an airport with planes, Watts argues, they record a warmer temperature than what is actually happening in the atmosphere. Therefore, pieces like this LA Times story about record-high temperatures last weekend are wrong.
As Sou at HotWhopper pointed out, station error has long been an obsession of Watts’, yet he still can’t explain why any particular record-breaking station “acted up so much more than on any other day, why on this particular day the higher reading couldn't possibly have been higher than the reading taken on another day.” A station on a roof or by a road is going to be biased by its surroundings every single day (something real climate scientists understand and account for when dealing with the records), so a record-high reading is still indicative of record-high temperatures.
Bastasch defended his write-up of Watts’ post on Twitter by implying this sort of thing matters for the climate record, showing that he’s either woefully ignorant or deliberately deceptive. We know this issue doesn’t impact the climate record--after all, the Kochs partially funded an effort, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, to ask and answer the question of whether or not urban development around surface temperature stations was making the temperature record look hotter than it should.
BEST was even spearheaded by Richard Mueller, who claimed to have serious questions about the reliability of the record, and at one time sounded an awful lot like a denier. But, after doing the math, the project found “no urban heating effect over the period 1950 to 2010.” And of course, despite promising to stand by the project’s findings before and during the study, Watts denied them once they were published.
The fact that Watts has his own temperature station business probably has nothing to do with his badmouthing other weather stations.
Finally, we’ll just note that while Bastasch’s article describes Watts as a meteorologist, that’s being rather generous. While Watts was an on-air weatherman for years, he never actually graduated from college with a degree in meteorology (or a degree at all.) We only mention this because we saw on Twitter that instead of talking to a meteorologist (Watts), LA Times’s Matt Pearce joked that Bastasch should’ve quoted him, “the world’s greatest expert” on LA being “insanely hot.”
Jokes aside, he’s not exactly wrong. Because the only thing Watts is an expert at is being wrong. We’ll call that being an incorrexpert.
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