Copenhagen Countdown: 3

Keeping track of a few of the published events going on preceding the official commencement of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference scheduled to start Monday.

1. Global warming lecture at the University of Texas-Austin canceled due to the earliest snowfall on record. Any snow at all in Austin is rare. Just so you know, the lecture sponsors are the Environmental Science Institute and the Jackson School of Geosciences. Here's the screenshot:

Houston at midday yesterday:


The Gore Effect. It's a Deity sense-of-humor thing. (H/t, JammieWearingFool via Gateway Pundit)

Update 8:50 p.m.: Baton Rouge, Louisiana was surprised by their second snowfall in 2 years. Very rare. Folks were out taking video of the event:

2. Belly laugh: UN to investigate East Anglia CRU.

In an interview with the BBC, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, said the issue raised by the e-mails was serious and said "we will look into it in detail."
"We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it," he said. "We certainly don't want to brush anything under the carpet."

This is the same guy who just a few days ago stated, unequivocally, that

The unfortunate incident that has taken place through illegal hacking of the private communications of individual scientists only highlights the importance of I.P.C.C. procedures and practices and the thoroughness by which the Panel carries out its assessment. This thoroughness and the duration of the process followed in every assessment ensure the elimination of any possibility of omissions or distortions, intentional or accidental.

3. Less funny: UK Weather Service to re-examine 160 years of weather data, following the exposure of the global warmists' "CRU-tape letters" and crooked computer code. The weather service, known as the Met Office, doesn't expect to have the new analysis until the end of 2012. (H/t, Watts Up With That?)

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.
[snip]
Since the stolen e-mails were published, the chief executive of the Met Office has written to national meteorological offices in 188 countries asking their permission to release the raw data that they collected from their weather stations.

4. However, the UK Government "is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination." The Government's argument: The re-examination "would be seized upon by climate change sceptics."

I wonder if the re-examiners will get around to looking at the sites from which the global weather data is gathered. Anthony Watts has examined the locations of dozens hundreds of the official U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature sensors, used to assess whether the planet is warming or not. He has been publishing a series called, "How not to measure temperature." Ahem.

I've seen some poorly thought out places to measure temperature, but this one takes the cake. Not only do we have the sensor above a sea of air conditioners with warm air exhausts, there are two rooftop building exhausts, plus the roof and building itself, and then lets not forget that the Press Democrat itself is in a sea of buildings in downtown Santa Rosa, all of which to contribute to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) the thermometer is exposed to.
Yes folks, this is an official USHCN Climate station of record. The data from this station goes into the national climatic database. But given the absurd and irresponsible placement of this NOAA MMTS thermometer, is it any wonder at all that the graph of temperature at Santa Rosa looks like it does?

This isn't a case of gradual encroachment by localized site changes that happened around the thermometer, like what happened in Marysville. This is a deliberate placement of an official thermometer in the worst possible measurement scenario. Somebody had to choose this location, the building and air conditioners did not grow up around it.

__________
Related posts:

• Copenhagen Countdown: 4
  
• Copenhagen Countdown: 5
  
• Copenhagen Countdown: 6
  
• ClimateGate: New Zealand Climate Scientists Aren't So Hot
  
• What ClimateGate Really Means
• Meditation: Issac Newton on Truthful Reporting of Data
• ClimateGate Who's Who
• Make Way for the Code Breakers
• Obama's Science Czar Holds a Whip in the Tree-Ring Circus
  
• What You Did Was Such a Crime
• Heh, Heh, Heh. Vincit Omnia Veritas