In continuation of my project to clear out links I’d put aside for possible mention (and to make up for my failure to notice that a link I put up this morning was more dated than I’d thought), here’s an interesting find that is, indeed, recent:

A new study about the surface temperature record presented at the 2015 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union suggests that the 30-year trend of temperatures for the Continental United States (CONUS) since 1979 are about two thirds as strong as officially NOAA temperature trends.

The upshot is that only about one-third of the temperature sensors that NOAA uses to track global warming have not been compromised in some way over the last three decades (by being moved or being near some change of landscape that would have changed the results or some other issue requiring correction).  And that one-third of sensors produces a significantly smaller warming trend than the compromised sensors.  Notably, as a chart from Anthony Watts, one of the authors of the study, shows, the official records are much closer to the results of the compromised stations than the uncompromised ones.

Alarmists might dismiss this as the work of non-official-climate-scientists, but such insistence on credentials is one of those long-standing practices of insiders that’s coming into question.  Science isn’t supposed to work that way.  From another perspective, as Classical Values Dave puts it, “It’s frankly comical that a team of unpaid volunteer skeptics had to do the real fieldwork of actually looking at the stations.”

As politicians (including dictators) insist on ever greater infringements on the people’s rights in the name of climate change, incentive grows for the people to investigate the basis for the infringements.  My money’s on the likelihood that the evidence will come up wanting.