Cooking The Books For Climate Change

If the CFO of a big corporation did this kind of stuff, he'd go to prison. But the consequences of manipulating climate change data is far more serious and leftists have seized upon global warming as their latest excuse for a power grab.

ohn Goetz, writing last month in the science blog Climate Audit, analyzed the way NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies calculates estimated global surface temperatures and showed that the addition of new, contemporary data could "have a ripple effect all the way back to the beginning of a [weather] station's history."

Goetz found 32 different versions of published global annual averages going back to Sept. 24, 2005, that showed the published figures – figures used as a baseline to demonstrate change through time – changing hundreds of times.

"On average 20% of the historical record was modified 16 times in the last 2 1/2 years," he wrote. "The largest single jump was 0.27 °C. This occurred between the Oct. 13, 2006 and Jan. 15, 2007 records when Aug 2006 changed from an anomoly of +0.43 °C to +0.70 °C, a change of nearly 68 percent."

Temperature anomalies – differences between the average measured global air temperature and some long-term mean – are primary data for studies of climate change.

The magnitude of the changes in the reworked historical data observed by Goetz – 0.27 °C – is more that a third of the total average increase in global air temperature near the Earth's surface – 0.74 ± 0.18 °C – that has occurred over the last century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

So what does this mean? It means that by manipulating the data to serve Algore, NASA has made itself the outlier among the three primary climate data sources.

The University of Alabama at Huntsville and Remote Sensing Systems provide data gathered by Earth-observation satellites. Satellite temperature data has the advantage of being gathered across the entire surface of the Earth, except for regions near the two poles, but it is unavailable for the period prior to 1978.

How do these other data sources compare to NASA?

According to Hadley's data, worldwide temperatures have declined since 1998 and the Earth is not much warmer now than it was than it was in 1878 or 1941.

Both the UAH and RSS satellite data agree with Hadley and show temperatures declining over the past decade with only a slight increase above the 30-year average between 1978 and 2008.

More recently, NASA temperatures indicated March 2008 was the third-warmest March in history. RSS and UAH showed the same month as only slightly above average globally and the second-coldest ever in the southern hemisphere.

Is there a political motive involved in NASA's data "massaging?" I'll take James Hansen's word for it on this one.

James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warned in 2006 "we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change ... no longer than a decade, at the most" – the same week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a report saying the U.S.'s hottest year was in the past, 1936.

Calm Down Ted, Soylent Green Is Movie, Not People

Ted Turner was on Charlie Rose's PBS show the other night discussing not taking drastic action to correct global warming:

Not doing it will be catastrophic. We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.

Apparently Turner's been watching too many old sci-fi movies on Turner Classic Movies. Is it any wonder people can't take all the global warming hysteria seriously? Celebrity nitwits like Turner couldn't do more damage to the environmental movement if they were paid saboteurs for the oil industry.

Klaatu Barada Nikto Globala Warmingo

"I'm sorry Al, I can't do that." I'm predicting an oceanwalk by the Goracle to shut down H.A.L. The robots MUST be malfunctioning if they don't show the global warming that a "CONSENSUS" of scientists say is happening.

According to National Public Radio:

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."

HELLLLOOOOO???? Earth to Willis. Perhaps that means THERE IS NO GLOBAL WARMING!!! It is religion that ignores contrary data, not science. In science, if the data contradicts your hypothesis, you modify the hypothesis.

This is a must-read story that shows how little we really know about the climate of this planet. Far too little to say that we are warming, cooling, or anything else with any certainty.

HT: Right Mind

Global Warming Fear Mongers: Oh, H-E-Double Hockey Sticks!

Michael Asher at Daily Tech reports that temperature monitors are reporting widescale global cooling. In fact, the drop in worldwide temperatures over the last 12 months has wiped out a century of warming.

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

Won't it be deliciously ironic if the only thing that saves us from the ravages of a new Ice Age are the people driving their big-ass SUVs while eating Quarter Pounders on the way to the sprawl-malls to buy their cheap Chinese crap? God does have a sense of humor.

OG: Original Gator

Alligator mississippiensis - the old school reptile from 65 million years ago; a survivor of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period that would make our current "global warming" look like a damp birthday candle.

This (6'5") Texas Fish & Game Officer ain't worried about being eaten by some wimpy Burmese Python.

HT: Uncle Bubba

Junk Your SUV, Or Giant Snakes Will Eat Your Children

I'm kinda surprised that Al Gore didn't think of this first.

As climate change warms the nation, giant Burmese pythons could colonize one-third of the USA, from San Francisco across the Southwest, Texas and the South and up north along the Virginia coast, according to U.S. Geological Survey maps released Wednesday.

Of course, if giant Burmese pythons don't get you, Ma Nature will.

In the Arctic tundra of Northern Alaska, an advance team working for a petroleum exploration company is engaged in a massive project to exploit the oil resources of the pristine land.

After one crewmember is found dead, a disorientation slowly claims the sanity of the other members of the team as each of them succumbs to an unknown fear.

This creeping dread bursts open when a malevolent wind brings down a plane that approaches the station. Explosions and carnage wreak havoc on the team and all functions fail in the camp, forcing two of the members out into the cold on a desperate bid for survival. As the two journey to find help, they find themselves utterly alone in a world that is unraveling- either they are being stalked by an invisible herd of menacing phantoms, or they are going mad.

Whatever does happen to them out there... they are never heard from again.

[...]

The Last Winter will be his boldest, most explicit, most challenging film to date, dealing with man's insatiable quest for oil in the face of environmental revolt.

Be amused, be very amused.