Facts are stubborn things, and we are forced to live within a framework of facts. But all too often, dogma is pushed to take precedence over facts, and that's a recipe for bad policy.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ongoing climate change discussion. Now, a new study by German engineer and scientist Moritz Büsing has shown some serious flaws in the methods of measuring temperatures, and the release of this work will no doubt draw fire from climate scolds in Germany, the rest of Europe - and the United States.

But facts are stubborn things.

According to a new study, weather station data has been shown to non-climatically and erroneously record warmer-than-actual temperatures due to the steady and perpetual aging process almost universally observed in temperature gauges.

When a weather station temperature gauge’s white paint or white plastic ages and darkens, this allows more solar radiation to be absorbed by the gauge than when the gauge is bright white and new. Within a span of just 2 to 5 years, a gauge has been observed to record maximum temperatures 0.46°C to 0.49°C warmer than in gauges that have not undergone an aging process. This artificial warming is not corrected in modern data sets, and it builds up over time – even when the gauges are cleaned or resurfaced every few years.

If these systematic artificial warming errors were to be corrected rather than ignored, the 140-year (1880-’90 to 2010-’20) GISTEMP global warming trend plummets from the current estimate of +1.43°C down to +0.83°C, a 42% differential. The temperature reduction can be even more pronounced – from +1.43°C down to +0.41°C – if a set of conservative assumptions (described in detail in the paper) are removed.

https://scienceofclimatechange.org/wp-content/uploads/SCC-Buesing-Weather-Station-Ageing-V4.2.pdf