Data: No Warming Since At Least 2005

It's official: No U.S. warming since at least 2005

The difficulty of accurately measuring average temperatures around the globe and across the United States has helped fuel the conflicting claims regarding climate change.

Purveyors of the belief that mankind is catastrophically impacting the global climate insist it's getting warmer year by year.But a new, improved system to assess surface temperatures established in 2005 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, indicates otherwise.

In fact, the U.S. Climate Reference Network -- comprised of 114 pristinely maintained temperature stations spaced relatively uniformly across the lower 48 states -- finds there has been no warming for the past 14 years at least, noted the Powerline blog.

While historically the U.S. has been considered to have the best records, surveys show that over half of the nation's weather stations do not comply with written standards, pointed out Powerline contributor John Hinderaker.

Some are next to airport runways and many are in cities, where temperatures are artificially inflated.

"And on top of all of that, the alarmists who curate weather records have systematically fiddled with them, lowering temperatures that were recorded decades ago and raising recent ones, to exaggerate the supposed phenomenon of global warming," he wrote.

Climate-change skeptics have pointed to examples such as Penn State Professor Michael Mann's iconic "hockey stick" graph purporting to show a spike in average global temperatures in the 20th century.  Mann lost a defamation suit last week after failing to present evidence to back his claim. Critics argue his graph doesn't take into account periods such as the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming Period.

NOAA's system utilizes locations far away from urban and land-development impacts, eliminating the need to adjust the data.

James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, writes at Real Clear Energy that there's "also good reason to believe U.S. temperatures have not warmed at all since the 1930s."

"Raw temperature readings at the preexisting stations indicate temperatures are the same now as 80 years ago," he writes.

"All of the asserted U.S. warming since 1930 is the product of the controversial adjustments made to the raw data. Skeptics point out that as the American population has grown, so has the artificial warming signal generated by growing cities, more asphalt, more automobiles, and more machinery."

Taylor contends that, if anything, the raw temperature readings "should be adjusted downward today relative to past temperatures (or past temperatures adjusted upward in comparison to present temperatures) rather than the other way around."

"If raw temperature readings are the same today as they were 80 years ago, when there were fewer artificial factors spuriously raising temperature readings, then U.S. temperatures today may actually be cooler than they were in the early 20th century," he reasons.