The latest of several guest commentaries published in this newspaper on Jan. 30 expressing doubt about human-caused climate change asks, “Are recent temperature records as certain as we think?” The question is interesting, so it’s worth answering here. Perhaps surprisingly, the short answer in this particular case is “no.”

The commentaries contain many technical errors and misleading statements, but I will focus here on the concerns about a record of daily high temperatures from Indian Lake. It supposedly refutes the vast evidence for greenhouse gas-driven warming because the station apparently recorded high temperatures early in the twentieth century rather than a simple upward trend. Adjustments made by the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) to account for the odd pattern are rejected as dishonest or incompetent. That lone record is then taken as evidence that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is not driving climate change, that global warming is instead due to the clearing of smoggy pollution in recent years and that the world’s scientific community has somehow missed or hidden this loss-of-shading effect.

The latest commentary correctly notes that Indian Lake has a relatively complete weather dataset, but there are problems with it, as there are with some other weather station datasets, too. The volunteers who do such sampling can have variable habits, their methodologies or station-locations change sometimes, and so on. As a result, adjacent stations are compared to one another by USHCN experts to help spot and fix those occasional glitches. That’s not corruption; it’s faithfulness to reality. When it’s a chilly day in the Adirondacks, a single station with a heat wave indicated in its raw data is likely to be wrong and including it uncritically in a regional average guarantees inaccuracy. As any capable climate scientist knows, individual weather records are not always 100% reliable on their own, nor do single records necessarily match planet-wide trends. Therefore, global warming is correctly measured as a global average instead, and the USHCN’s methods help to improve its accuracy.

Tellingly, the commentary overlooks data from the same station that contradicts it. The daily low temperatures — which are taken at night when shading effects from clouds or smog on the thermometer are not such an issue — show a clear-cut warming trend in both the raw and adjusted data. The commentary uses the raw daily highs instead, which, naturally, are taken during daytime. However, heat-trapping greenhouse gases operate 24-7, so if you want to look for evidence for or against carbon-driven warming without complications from sky-clearing, then the nocturnal lows are the best temperatures to use. The rise in nighttime low temperatures at Indian Lake is just what we would expect from greenhouse-warming.

Such selective use of evidence to support a preconceived outcome while rejecting contradictory data is prohibited in science, but it is a common practice in climate denial arguments. It’s called “cherry-picking.”

Now, if one record from Indian Lake shows early warmth while the others do not, how does good science deal with the contradiction? By checking the neighboring stations, for starters. That’s what the USHCN does, and it shows that the warm-to-cool pattern in the unadjusted daily highs at Indian Lake is not typical among other Adirondack stations. There must be an error somewhere, but where? The Indian Lake station itself provides a clue.

An overview of Adirondack stations by meteorologist Jerome Thaler (Adirondack Weather, 2006) shows that the daily-high readings at Indian Lake were taken at 5 p.m. during the first part of the century but were switched to 8 a.m. after 1942. It’s usually warmer at 5 p.m. than at 8 a.m., so the switch would have produced what Thaler called a “time of observation bias” that skews the data significantly. Wouldn’t one then expect to find oddly high temperatures early on in that record? That’s just what the commentaries’ favored record shows. In other words, the cherry-picked record of daily highs is not as reliable as the opinion pieces have implied.

In case a reader needs to be reminded, the limitations of individual land-based weather stations are well known to climate scientists, they are properly taken into account by experts and they don’t stand alone. The scientific consensus on greenhouse-driven global warming is so strong because it also rests on huge amounts of additional high-quality data from independent sources worldwide that include: [1] daily weather balloon measurements, [2] satellite measurements, [3] ocean temperatures, [4] tree rings, lake sediments and ice cores, [5] measurements of the sun, air pollution and volcanoes, and more. Recent daytime sky-clearing contributes to but doesn’t cause the main warming trend.

Now let’s return to the underlying question of distrust in science. When you know that technical glitches can occur in single weather records, isn’t it more honest to openly acknowledge and respond to them rather than ignore them? The commentary suggests that the untreated cherry-picked record is more reliable than the rest, but it clearly is not. The USHCN’s algorithms are carefully designed to account for such mistakes, and the process is not a secret. It is explained on their website, and both the original raw data and the algorithm-adjusted records are posted online for public use. That’s good science. Choosing to use that single flawed record from Indian Lake to try to refute the entire global pattern is not.

In contrast, the seemingly endless flood of climate disinformation that fosters so much suspicion of reputable experts is demonstrably linked to the fossil fuel industry, Russia, corrupt pundits-for-profit and bad actors in our own government. Those sources are not motivated by the common good but rather by their own financial or political incentives to spread doubt about science (see “Merchants of Doubt” by Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes, or “The New Climate War” by Michael Mann). Sadly, their approach works all too well on folks who are susceptible to it.

If such misguided suspicions were instead focused on the actual unscrupulous manipulators named above, rather than on our best climate science, we’d all be better off.

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Curt Stager is a climate scientist at Paul Smith’s College and University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute. He lives in Saranac Lake.