Founding Fathers Skewed Climate Data, Too

When they weren't busy founding the nation, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were quite the climate scientists.

Jefferson wrote to Madison in 1787 to express his view of the pressing need for "… a bill of rights providing clearly & without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal & unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land…." It was just a few years before this that Jefferson made quite a different request to Madison:

I wish you had a thermometer … [to] observe at Sunrise & at 4 o'clock p.m. which are the coldest & warmest points of the day. If you could observe at the same time it would shew the difference between going North & Northwest on this continent. (TJ to JM, February 20, 1784)

But some would say they established a pattern of carelessness that survives today.

As a new American Scientist article describes, the two measured the weather at those times for years, hoping to systematically quantify the differences between their climes.

In 1787, Madison realized that the porch was a better place to keep his measuring equipment than -- as proscribed the Royal Society -- an unheated room in the north side of his house. He urged Jefferson to do the same.

Jefferson, ever the corner-cutter, kept his thermometers inside until
1803. For sixteen long years, that particular weather station was located in an urban heat sink, its data skewed artificially upwards.

What controversy entailed when Jefferson and Madison tried to correct for the variation is sadly unknown to this author.

Revolutionary Minds [American Scientist]