Dr. Matthew Wielicki: The Weather Stations We Never Had
How sparse thermometers and generous infilling built a global temperature story.
A central pillar of the climate-crisis narrative is simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker… today is the hottest in human history. That line only works if you accept, without question, that we have reliable, global temperature data before satellites. We do not. What we have is a patchwork of land stations concentrated in a few developed regions, a lot of ocean guesses from ship tracks, and then, later, generous statistical infilling.
Everyone agrees the 1930s were brutally hot across the United States… the Dust Bowl was a humanitarian and ecological disaster. Crops failed, soils blew away, and heat waves killed thousands. NOAA’s own retrospectives still call out 1936 as a benchmark summer, and July 1936 remains a singular month in the U.S. record.
Atmospheric CO₂ at that time was roughly 310 PPM, a level derived from ice core records and widely used in NASA’s GISS datasets.
So the story we are told goes like this… yes, the U.S. was scorched in the 1930s, but the world was cooler, and only in the modern era did global temperatures rise everywhere. That story depends less on observations and more on algorithms.
The global map we never measured
Now the uncomfortable part. When there are no thermometers, you either leave grid boxes blank, or you paint numbers in from far away. HadCRUT historically left many boxes blank, explicitly avoiding interpolation, which means the “global” mean depends on where you have observations. NASA’s GISTEMP goes the other direction and spreads anomalies up to twelve hundred kilometers from a station, filling the gaps with 1200 km smoothing. Those are not trivial choices, they are the ballgame.
If you overlay the 1930s anomaly map with the station density maps, you see something obvious… warm where the thermometers were numerous, cool or neutral where coverage was threadbare. A compilation of historical station distribution between 1921 and 1950 makes the same basic point… the network was sparse and badly unbalanced.
Today’s “records,” the jet-exhaust problem
If you want to read more you have to subscribe to Irrational Fear
Dr. Matthew Wielicki
This article was published on 9 August 2025 by Dr Matthew Wielicki on his website Irrational Fear.
By subscribing you can unlock the full breakdown, plus get access to more than 380 deep-dive pieces that dismantle the pillars of the climate crisis narrative.
more news
Opinion Michelle Stirling: The climate report the mainstream media thought you shouldn’t see
A major U.S. climate science review undercuts doomsday narratives — but the press, climate investors, and Canadian policymakers aren’t interested in a real debate.
Climate Oscillations 12: The Causes & Significance
In this post we will examine the idea that ocean and atmospheric oscillations are random internal variability, except for volcanic eruptions and human emissions, at climatic time scales. This is a claim made by the IPCC when they renamed the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) to the Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (AMV) and the PDO to PDV, and so on.
More on the New Climate Report from the US DOE
This report will be a very useful mechanism to allow much more open dialogue on the climate change policy journey that will affect us all. It’s clear from this report that Climate science is far from settled and that the past frozen narrative of the climate emergency is over.
