Posted by
Always To The Right on Sunday, November 16, 2008 2:09:01 PM
The main statistical facility for global-warming activists compounded error with folly
and have undermined their credibility entirely. NASA’s Goddard
Institute for Space Studies announced that last month was the warmest
October on record, surprising meteorologists who had seen colder
temperatures and unseasonal snowstorms and wondered where all the heat
originated
When outside analysts showed that GISS used September temperatures
in Russia for its conclusions about October, GISS admitted that it has
no quality control over the numbers is uses for its analysis:
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.
And Dr. James Hansen, one of Al Gore’s chief allies on his
global-warming crusade, has cooked the books before, as have his
associates:
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.
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.
NASA must investigate this episode at GISS and insist on reliable
production of accurate statistics. If they have scientists who can’t
tell September from October and can’t recognize a cooling cycle in the
Arctic, then they need new leadership at GISS, starting with Hansen.
The admission from GISS that they can’t verify their source data when
reaching to conclusions should embarrass scientists throughout the
profession, as verification of data is absolutely necessary beforeany conclusions. Without that, GISS may as well be studying the entrails of goats to make predictions about the future climate. reaching