Monday, November 17, 2008

Dedicated public servant, Dr. James Hansen, would appreciate it if bloggers would just mind their own business.


"A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record."


If by “blunder” one means “cooking the books” then, yes, Dr. Hansen’s outfit would appear to have blundered.

"In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running."
(emphasis ours)

Wait, it gets better. In order to save face and stubbornly cling to their own falsity that this past October was the hottest on record, the GISS revised the Russian figures downward and to balance-out those new lower numbers mysteriously claimed to have discovered a new “hot spot” in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

Hey, where are you going… there’s more. When you get on a roll like the GISS is, there’s just no telling when the “blundering” will stop.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.


We didn’t experience what we have been told is the pure bliss of a statistics course but isn’t one of the basic principles of the discipline to (where applicable) throw out the high and low scores. “… but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.” Nope. No agenda, here.

Excellent. National and global policy decisions on the environment and the economy will be made in part from data presented by an outfit so inept and corrupt (quite possibly, both) they are not quite sure whether to lie about their own figures or blame it on someone else.

Read entire article here, which recounts another time Hansen was nailed by those damn bloggers and about another one of Big Al’s buddies, a choo-choo engineer turned climate science expert.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dude! Isn't that the artwork from the Journey album covers??

- Mongo in the Sky Keeps on Turnin'

Dean said...

I was thinking a little Earth, Wind and Fire, also.

Ohioan@Heart said...

Actually using the one that is "always" the highest will probably produce no more of an upward (or downward) trend than the others (unless it is steadily moving away!), but might reduce the internal scatter, if the others are bouncing around.

On the other hand, if you were serious about reporting the truth, you'd use all four and weight them based on historical uncertainty. That is, if you cared about the truth.

Dean said...

O@H, once again, thanks for lending your informed analysis.

BeyondKen said...

Here’s what NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) actually said:

“The global land surface temperature was 50.72 degrees F — 2.02 degrees F above the 20th century mean of 48.7 degrees F, ranking as the warmest October on record. The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for January-October was 58.25 degrees F – 0.85 degree above the 20th century mean of 57.4 degrees F and ranking as the 9th warmest January-October on record.”
- www.noaanews.noaa.gov