Some questionable data from Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Just the other day we were listening to Michio Kaku and his radio guest explain that scientists get corrupted and often are willing to believe in erroneous data in pursuit of an important dream. Global warming may be one such dream, even as it gets challenged daily, and even as evidence mounts that we appear to be in a cooling trend. In light of that, we found this UK Telegraph piece very interesting:
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.
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…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…by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre…GISS began hastily revising its figures…
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…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…
Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising “very much faster” than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped. Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him.
Can you guess where Dr. Hansen gets his funding for “legal and media advice”?
November 18th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
I can spell fraud. The evidence is there, and I will be merciless in mocking the “authorities” who choose to ignore it. We can start with Mr Hansen. After an earlier episode with some questionably scrubbed data, measurement stations that are located so that they produce misleading results, and this mess, one can conclude that he is either reckless or dishonest. Either way, he’s not trustworthy.