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November 16, 2008
'This is not the Climate Change I knew'
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.High Priest Gore of the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming is not pleased. How will The One be able to enforce cap-n-trade, deliver $6/gal gasoline, institute government controlled thermostats and make credible PE BarryO!'s canned "you must sacrifice" mantra?This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". 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.
The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" 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. [...]
If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)
Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.
Whoopsie!
(h/t Dan Collins)
Posted by Darleen at November 16, 2008 09:09 AM
Comments
Enjoy your wildfires.
Posted by: Josh at November 16, 2008 10:29 PM
Josh
I am sure you will be happy to hear that around 800 homes have been lost in the last 6 days.
Posted by: ML at November 17, 2008 04:08 AM
Josh, you are an ass.
Posted by: Chris at November 17, 2008 07:27 AM
Wait, let me amend that epithet. Josh is a ghoul, and a particularly nasty one at that. Instead of disagreeing with the gist of the post, or arguing that the evidence provided is wrong, he hopes that hundreds or thousands of people he doesn't know have their lives catastrophically impacted by a natural phenomenon that has occurred regularly as long as I can remember.
I guess if Josh is offended or nonplussed by some bit of news, he just wishes that the lives of the messengers would be upended. Perhaps some conservatives could be burned alive in order to feed his desires.
Posted by: Chris at November 17, 2008 07:38 AM
Eat a dick, Chris. Get off your high horse and try thinking about the link between November wildfires and global warming. In other words, get the point, dumbass.
Posted by: Josh at November 17, 2008 05:15 PM
Fuck you, Josh, you miserable shit. You're using a trumped up "theory" that's being debunked every time anyone turns around as an excuse to feel good about bad things happening to others. You make me sick.
Posted by: Chris at November 17, 2008 05:37 PM