Anthony Watts became famous for and has since run one of the most widely popular websites in the virtual world. Watts Up With That cut its teeth on a scandal of global temperature reporting. All that warming the Marxist-Globalist Cabal was citing to rob us blind and make us dependent on their energy whimsy was the result of urban encroachment on weather stations.
Once sited on grassy locales, most had long since been surrounded by urban modernity, some even in range of heat exhaust from equipment or surrounded by concrete or cement. Sometimes both. Even a child knows that the temperature on asphalt or concrete is higher than the grass next to it. And the further you get from heat-retaining infrastructure, the less oppressive the heat.
That change over time led to a systematic rise of daily average temperatures, which the climate cult seized on as proof that humans were warming the planet. It was proof that human-created urban heat islands were really corrupting the data and beginning the climate wars.
The debate continues, with climateers pretending they can still prove man-made warming if they just adjust the urban heat effects, blah blah, etc., using the same computer models that keep getting everything else wrong. They have to. Their grants depend on the lie being true and them being in a well-funded position to keep selling it.
Post Ice-Age warming is as real as post ice-age sea-level rise, but you’re denying modern-day comforts, raising taxes, or keeping the third world in the toilet are no more likely to make a difference with that than they would subsidence, changes to the ocean floor, heat causing the ocean water to expand, or any other number of natural forcings.
But not to get too far from the point, you can do research that proves these things, in places where you can see just how biased the results are as a result of station placement.
A new analysis by The Heartland Institute finds that the official temperature station at Reno-Tahoe International Airport consistently records warmer temperatures than a nearby properly sited reference station, demonstrating how station placement and local surroundings can introduce measurable bias into surface temperature records.
This is particularly important because Reno is often cited as “the fastest warming city in the United States,” with the blame being placed squarely on climate change.
The researchers discovered as much as three degrees difference on the tarmac sensors than at a station in the grass, still in the city, but not surrounded by concrete.
Average temperature differences between the official ASOS station and the GOATS station were as follows:
2024
- Daytime highs: +1.35°F
- Nighttime lows: +2.91°F
- Daily average: +2.13°F
2025
- Daytime highs: +0.64°F
- Nighttime lows: +2.20°F
- Daily average: +1.42°F
The airport station reported warmer nighttime temperatures on more than 90 percent of nights during both years of measurement.
The nightime temp difference is a huge giveaway that this is a flawed way to do science. The sunlight and heat captured by the runways radiate back out overnight, leaving the temperature equipment there. The heat island corrupts the data.
I’d add that the second station is likewise compromised by the vast urban swell that surrounds the grassy spot in which it was placed. Even city parks are warmer than true rural areas.
The Reno experiment builds on the findings of The Heartland Institute’s 2022 report “Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Surface Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed,” which documented widespread siting issues among official U.S. weather stations.
Unlike earlier surveys that examined station placement, the Reno experiment provides direct side-by-side measurements taken under identical weather conditions.
Absurd sums have been spent to hide the truth and legitimize the fraud, all of which have cost you even more, as the response to the lies has driven up energy costs and supply, making everything more expensive. It’s one of the reasons we write about this fraud. It is government interventions and regulatory overreach, with a very high price tag, that directly affect the quality of life, especially for the so-called most vulnerable.
Making electricity a luxury helps no one. The recent shift, thanks to the Trump Administration, is a gift that keeps giving. Thanks to changes in political and regulatory posture, and the rise of AI, the left’s decades-long effort to make electricity unaffordable has led us to a potential renaissance. Big Tech has to be pro-energy, affordable energy, and that need is driving innovation and culture, which has pushed at least a few of the enviro-wacky leftists to embrace nuclear, small-scale, and larger.
It is an important shift.
Climate Change was always about control. If the government could put a hood over affordable energy and beat it to death in a dark alley, regulators could insist on rationing and managing it. The original Green New Deal pulled the hood off to reveal what modernity would have to sacrifice. Personal vehicles and air travel would become luxuries for the connected elites. Heating and cooling as well. In fact, living as we knew it would have to take several steps backward, with millions forced to abandon the suburbs for the 15-minute cities plan that was its natural extension.
You, confined and controlled, where they could keep an eye on you.
None of this is new or surprising. UN Development Goals and progressive redistribution of wealth. The systematic neutering of American Greatness and the opportunity it represented for the rest of the world. If there was no place left where you could escape to, there was no reason to dream any bigger than the role the ruling class had trapped you in. Government was the only path to better, and only if you followed its rules.
Quite the journey from fraudulent temp data to totalitarianism, but there is no denying the facts. As communism retracted in the late 20th century, the Marxists put the pedal down on race, gender, and climate wars. And that was working. Still is, in too many places. But Americans keep trying to push back. Trump 2.0 has done as much, if not more, damage to that corruption as any other administration, maybe ever.
Plenty left to do. Don’t let the left undo what has been accomplished or slow the progress because they will. It could all be undone, and quickly, and if you think the political prosecutions under Biden were bad, any future Democrat administration we allow in office, at least until all the work is done, will make that look like a couple’s quarrel in the local bistro.
