Posted on 08/09/2007 2:58:33 PM PDT by Neville72
A change in climate history data at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently occurred which dramatically alters the debate over global warming. Yet, this transpired with no official announcement from GISS head James Hansen, and went unreported until Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit discovered it Wednesday.
For some background, one of the key tenets of the global warming myth being advanced by Hansen and soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore is that nine of the ten warmest years in history have occurred since 1995.
McIntyre has been crunching the numbers used to determine such things as published by GISS, and has identified that the data have recently changed such that four of the top ten warmest years in American history occurred in the 1930s, with the warmest now in 1934 instead of the much-publicized 1998.
As McIntyre wrote Wednesday (emphasis added, h/t NBer dscott):
There has been some turmoil yesterday on the leaderboard of the U.S. (Temperature) Open and there is a new leader.
[...]
Four of the top 10 are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900.
Most importantly, according to the GISS, 1998 is no longer the warmest year in American history. That honor once again belongs to 1934.
As global warming is such a key issue being debated all around this country and on Capitol Hill, wouldn't such a change by the agency responsible for calculating such things be important to disseminate? When this correction was made by Hansen's team at the GISS, shouldn't it have been reported?
In fact, it is quite disgraceful that it wasn't, as it suggests that a government agency is actually participating in a fraud against the American people by withholding information crucial to a major policy issue now facing the nation.
Think this will be Newsweek's next cover-story?
No, I don't either.
Post facto thought: If Hansen's team had made changes to the data which showed that ten of the ten warmest years in American history occurred since 1995, do you think that would have been reported?
Yeah, I do, too.
*****Update: This appears to be necessary given some very silly e-mail messages that I've received. Gore's claim concerning warmest years in history pertains to data for the entire planet. The changes at GISS are only for American data.
However, as e-mail messages from various scientists around the world have pointed out, American climate data collection is the finest on the planet. It is expected that when these changes are made to numbers across the globe, the worldwide rankings might see some changes as well.
Yet, still more to the point is the fact that American data were changed without any announcement.
Noel Sheppard is an economist, business owner, and Associate Editor of NewsBusters.
Click on POGW graphic for full GW rundown
New!!: Dr. John Ray's
GREENIE WATCH
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
Looks like there’s a few stations undocumented along my various paths. I’ll get on it.
How would it qualify as an honest mistake if Hansen for asll these years has refused to let anyone check his algorythms?
Wegman findings:
http://www.urban-renaissance.org/urbanren/publications/WegmanReport[3].pdf
Findings
In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling. We also comment that they were attempting to draw attention to the discrepancies in MBH98 and MBH99, and not to do paleoclimatic temperature reconstruction. Normally, one would try to select a calibration dataset that is representative of the entire dataset. The 1902-1995 data is not fully appropriate for calibration and leads to a misuse in principal component analysis. However, the reasons for setting 1902-1995 as the calibration point presented in the narrative of MBH98 sounds reasonable, and the error may be easily overlooked by someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimatology studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians.
In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus independent studies may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. This committee does not believe that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue.
It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Manns assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.
* The CFR methodology is essentially the methodology used in the MBH98/99 papers, but the terminology was not used until later.
Basically, these have all been cries in the wilderness - there’s no grant money in in the truth. It took 25 years to correct the data from 1800 to 1910 based on air pressure compensation of heavy-column mercury thermometers and inaccurate calibrations.
Pretty tough to get there, isn't it?
Does Hanson do anything useful for the taxpayers, or is he a full time global warming jihadi?
Well, scientists with agendas are a bad thing.
susie
I have no doubt the whole data set is skewed towards favoring the global warming theory. There is so much manipulation of the data and so much money at stake in proving global warming exists. If the ‘studies’ all of a sudden showed global warming is not an immediate dangers, billions and billions of dollars of research would dry up.
In that case James Hansen is not a scientist, and ought to return his PhD.
I have heard that Hansen is going to accept a job as The New Republic science writer (sarc!).
NASA isn’t the main weather agency. They do some work in the field on contract.
He’d do well to start advising the Media on Iraq status and policy and give up the AGW.
“I guess this is another reason why Al Gore did not stick around to talk to Bjorn Lomborg at the House Hearing on Global Warming back in March.”
No, he was afraid his intro song was going to be “It’s Getting Hot In Here (So Take Off All Your Clothes), and that would have been so, so wrong.
Referance ping to bash the Gaia earth worshipers with *
1934 makes the glo warmers look silly. Lying about 1998 was what the glo warmers were counting on to push their agenda....opps the turds lose again.
A guy called Rush today to say that worldwide temps seemed to be on the upswing because after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they no longer monitored their climate data and their numbers were left off subsequent tallies of average temps worldwide. Russia, being so cold most of the time--their numbers were not available to balance out the rest of the world's temps, so it gave the impression that the planet was heating up during the '90s. I don't know if this info can be verified but it was an interesting point the guy made.
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