Does anybody remember the freezing October we just had? Record freezing temperatures worldwide. Record snowfall worldwide. Kinda hard to forget.
So, what’s to make of the recent breathless statement of Al Gore’s consiglieri James Hansen of NASA? Hansen has announced that October 2008 was the hottest on record.
Unless you’re a zombie man-made global warming believer, then your Bravo Sierra detector (as Tammy Bruce calls it) should be blaring deafeningly loud right about now.
Bottom line: October 2008 was pretty damn cold for the world population. So how did Hansen come to the conclusion that it was the hottest on record? Simple: He fixed the data! More specifically, Hansen re-used September readings from thermometers in Russia for the October data. Nice, huh?
These revelations were reported in this past Sunday’s U.K. Telegraph (on the Opinion page! Why???):
The world has never seen such freezing heat
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/11/2008
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.
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.
Are you taking this in? In reality, it was the 70th hottest—i.e., the 44th coldest—in 114 years? Record snowfall records worldwide? That’s not a blunder; that’s fixing the data. Big time. No way is this an innocent mistake.
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.
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.
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.)
This is un-freaking-believable. Even criminal. Yet, I still don’t expect anybody in this Alice in Wonderland world of ours to come forward and say, “Hmm. Ya know what? Al Gore’s little scientist friend is a fraud. He’s cooked the data to suit his own agenda. And don’t tell me Al Gore doesn’t know about this. The man has made seven figures off this man-made global warming scam; he has to know what his boy at NASA is up to.
In addition, as the Telegraph article goes on to say, this is not the first time Hansen has been caught fixing the climate data! As Christopher Horner (author of the book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism) reported last September that the very same Anthony Watts caught NASA fixing the data by placing thermometers “… in Arizona parking lots, overhanging black asphalt pads, near cell towers and hot-air blowing air conditioner exhausts or next to trash burn barrels, … setting one just away from a chimney directly above a Weber barbecue grill …”
Horner goes on to explain:
This embarrassment came amid NASA also having to correct its data since the year 2000, which has been used to support many of the global warming alarmists’ “money claims”, such as Al Gore’s line that 9 of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the past decade.
Well, no. We now know that this is false and that NASA has corrected the record to reflect that the warmest year in the U.S. was 1934, 4 of the 10 warmest here occurred in the 1930s, 3 during the 1990s, and one each in the 1920s, 1950s and this decade. That this claim has now been debunked, like most every other statement of substance in Mr. Gore’s movie, will no doubt be disregarded by activist educators using the propagandistic movie in school curricula.
Regardless, as a result of all of the controversy a clearly not amused National Climatic Data Center suddenly pulled the actual locations of the temperature measuring stations from publicly available resources! Mr. Watts took them to task. As of this writing, the locations are again publicly available.
This brazen act nonetheless prompted me to file a request under the Freedom of Information Act seeking the internal deliberations behind such apparent trickery. NCDC has yet to respond, but watch this space, for I also sought internal discussion of a related, potential scandal picked up by climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. That is NCDC’s continuing decision to not make photos of particular Historical Climate Network sites, that are in their possession, publicly available (see Pielke’s blog post, “NOAA Cover Up Of US Historical Climate Network Surface Station Photographs”).
First of all, why the heck is none of this ever reported in the U.S. mainstream media? Never mind; I already know the answer: The same reason they didn’t report on Barack Obama’s sordid connections until after he safely won the election.
And second of all, why does James Hansen still have a job? Not once, but twice he has been caught fixing the data in order to further his own radical anti-capitalist agenda. He should at least have his doctoral degree revoked.
People, the Global Warming hoax is worse than pissing on your leg and telling you that it’s raining. It’s telling you that it’s raining without even pissing on your leg. It’s a lie. A L-I-E. And our President-elect and VP-elect (and, God help us, the failed Republican presidential candidate too) believe in man-made warming completely.
Discussing the Telegraph article, Dennis Prager bet on his show the other day that in his lifetime Al Gore and James Hansen would end up written in history as buffoons. I really hope he’s right!
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