The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a preliminary climate report this week looking back at 2015 in the U.S. The headline quite clearly spells out the intended alarm: “Record December boosted 2015 to 2nd warmest year for Contiguous US.” The Daily Signal’s David Kreutzer’s quells some of this rhetoric with two critical observations:

> First, there are serious questions about the quality of the weather stations and the adjustments made to the raw data. Many of the weather stations are located in areas that have been increasingly compromised. For instance stations that used to be in fields, but are now surrounded by buildings and parking lots, can have the temperature readings affected by the retained heat of asphalt and concrete, and by heat given off by heating and cooling systems. In addition the stations are not distributed in a regular, comprehensive geological pattern. Though NOAA tries to adjust for the many thorny temperature data problems, the adjustment process seems to have inserted an upward bias to the temperature trend. Researchers have found that the U.S. warming trend with the adjusted data is 50 percent greater than for the raw data from the most reliable weather stations. Second, this recent data report is only for the U.S. NASA’s satellite temperature record for the world shows a definite leveling of temperatures for the past decade or two. It also clearly shows that the 2015 El Nino year was cooler than 1998 with its monster El Nino.

It’s also interesting to note that NOAA is gung-ho about December’s record warmth (and let’s be clear: it was very warm across the country, even by satellite measurements), but is much less enthusiastic about the record cold in February that was even more impressive in some areas. But neither of those two months prove anything about global warming. As Kreutzer notes, “History is replete with record-breaking weather events. The future will have them as well, whether CO2 levels increase, decline, or stay the same.”