Editors at Issues and Insights take aim at activists who want the Biden administration to declare a climate “emergency.”

Just last week, congressional Democrats were urging President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency because some Americans were enduring a patch of hot weather. Though more than a bit meshuga, they couldn’t match the fever of Bill Weir. The CNN chief climate correspondent said, also last week, that “the fate of life on earth is at stake” because Washington isn’t doing more to cool the planet.

Yet again, pieces of a puzzle a pre-schooler could put together in a couple of minutes are missing.

One of those lost pieces is the surface temperature record that the climate alarmists tell us is evidence that man is overheating Earth. They treat the record as if it’s irrefutable fact. But it’s not quite that. The reality is the temperature record has “been substantially corrupted,” according to a new study.

“Approximately 96% of U.S. temperature stations fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be ‘acceptable,’ uncorrupted placement,” says former broadcast meteorologist Anthony Watts in a Heartland Institute study. “These findings strongly undermine the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends.”

On his own site, Watts calls the study a followup to the “widespread corruption and heat biases found at NOAA stations in 2009.” 

Previously, Watts found that “many climate monitoring stations were located next to exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, located on blistering-hot rooftops, or placed near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat.”

Somehow the “heat-bias distortion problem,” he adds, “is even worse now.”

The stations that Watts audited are part of the National Weather Service’s Cooperative Observer Program. According to the NWS, it is “a network of daily weather observations taken by more than 8,500 volunteers,” and records data, including “observations from the late 1800s,” considered “vital to understanding the U.S. climate.”