Climategate, Australian, records, urban heat island, Hughes

A seminal study into global warming by those at the centre of the ClimateGate controversy is now under scrutiny, with claims that the selection of weather data from Australia may have created an exaggerated warming trend.

Australian scientist Warwick Hughes says that up to 40 per cent of the data used in the Australian study from long-term records came from urban areas where data may have been affected by the Urban Heat Island effect – the phenomenon where heat-retaining surfaces in metropolitan areas cause significant increases in temperature compared to surrounding rural areas.

Hughes claims that the important 1986 study by Professor Phil Jones and colleagues has significant flaws. Professor Jones recently stood aside from his position as Director of the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University pending an inquiry into information released in leaked emails - the so-called ClimateGate affair.

“For over 200 years Earth has been recovering from the Little Ice Age and the associated solar minimums so, of course, warming has taken place. Our position is to draw attention to what we believe are deficiencies in the Jones et al. methodologies which were important studies in the development of the global warming hypothesis,” Mr Hughes said.

“The Jones 1986 study looked at 86 Australian stations and rejected 46. Of the 40 they used 27 were examined over the short term and 13 over the long term. Of the long-term studies, five came from large cities. The 27 short-term stations were mostly only quoted from 1951 onward – regardless of what data was available. The years just post WWII were not prominently warm in Australia so an ‘automatic’ warming trend was reinforced into the CRU Australian component.”

Mr Hughes said numerous examples can be seen where records from particular sites that show warming are contradicted by weather records in nearby rural weather stations. Another anomaly in the study, he claims, is that no weather stations in New South Wales or Victoria were taken into account apart from those in capital cities.

“Those proposing huge changes to the world economy owe it to the rest of us not to use data that is contaminated by local urban heat islands,” Mr Hughes concluded.