To me it is a political piece that clearly indicates that data not originating in the USA is somehow suspect.
"(Some) data not originating in the USA is suspect" does not equal "Only Americans know how to record temperatures".
I would say the cost of paint is not a significant factor whether a temperature shelter gets painted or not. The most significant factor (I think) is whether the people maintaining the the equipment can be bothered painting or not. So should we conclude countries with lazy habits have their data excluded?
People in desperately poor countries, some of which have to deal with internal violence, you are at the margin less likely to get a very consistent effort day after day over decades. Individuals, and individual recording spots will do a wonderful job for the whole time. Others for only part of the time. A few won't do it right at all. This also applies to American recording spots. We all (US, Europe, Africa, etc. etc.) can record what the thermometer says. But if you have a civil war, you might lose the opportunity to record the data. Absent such violence you still might not properly deal with maintenance (including but not limited to painting), or may have a problem with "urban heat islands", or just local heat effects (monitoring points that used to be in an open field, are now near a building, or parking lot). There are problems like this in the US data (and presumably data from other developed countries but I haven't seen much about their data collection points), so it would hardly be surprising that you have problems in place like Africa.
And at the margin, poorer countries will tend to have worse data than richer countries. Its not a situation where "all the data in the rich countries is great and all the data from Africa sucks", you have good and bad data from different regions. It certainly doesn't amount to "People in poor countries can't record temperatures because their too stupid." |
