The End Of The Myth Of Man-Caused Global Warming

The following article details how the concept of man-caused global warming (and climate change) should be dead and buried.  It won't be of course, because there are too many people whose reputations and livelihoods depended upon (they must save face) and still do depend on promoting this gigantic, terrible hoax.  Indeed, there are entire college departments offering degrees in "climatology", "environmental science" or "climate science".  That means for this charade to end there must be a lot of inertia to overcome, and a lot of government funding to be terminated.  That is just not going to happen very quickly.

If this climate "research" had been done by private business, it would have gone bankrupt and died long ago.  Instead, it serves as a prime example of how government involvement in research and development leads to corruption, breeds incompetence, and wastes an ungodly amount of taxpayers money.  Will we learn from this?  Maybe, a little bit, for a little while, but the same thing goes on in any endeavor that becomes political, which by definition, everything does when government "support" is involved.  Think solar energy (Solyndra), or wind power, electric cars, and a host of other activities.  Those of us who seek the truth about these things must be ever vigilant.  A quick scan of past articles posted on this blog alone illustrates how long and difficult battle it has been to reveal the truth about global warming.  We will however keep up the good fight, for truth, justice and limited government involvement and real, honest science.
Peter

The Death of the Hockey Stick?

Posted By Rand Simberg On May 17, 2012 @ 12:00 am In Environment,History,Media,Politics,Science,Science & Technology | 74 Comments

source: http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-death-of-the-hockey-stick/?singlepage=true

People who have been following the climate debate closely know that one of the most controversial and key elements of the controversy is the so-called “hockey stick” — a graph of supposed global temperature over the past centuries that ostensibly shows a dramatic increase in average temperature in the last century or so (the upward swoop of the graph at that point is the business end of the stick, with regard to the puck). It vaulted its inventor, Michael Mann of Penn State University, to climate stardom, with associated acclaim and government grants, when he first presented it in the late ’90s. It was the visual basis of much of the hysteria in recent years, from Al Gore’s Oscar-winning crockumentary ^[1] to bogus reports ^[2] from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Unfortunately for those promoting the theory (and the potentially economically catastrophic policy recommendations supposedly supported by it), recent events indicate that the last basis of scientific support for the hockey stick may be crumbling. But to understand this, a little background is necessary.

Ultimately, in addition to Mann’s claim for the dramatic recent uptick (which we are supposed to presume was a result of the late industrial revolution and equally dramatic increase in carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a result of the liberation of carbon from burning long-buried fossil fuels), Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England controversially declared, based on Eurasian data, that the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (MWP), from around 950 to 1250 CE — the European Middle Ages — didn’t actually exist.
This claim was important, if not essential, to Mann’s thesis, because his initial formulation only went back to 1400, the beginning of the so-called Little Ice Age. Critics of the theory thus argued immediately upon its presentation that it shouldn’t be surprising that the earth was warming now, given that we are still coming out of it, and that the medieval warming in the absence of late Carolingian SUVs and coal plants argued that the climate naturally cycled, with no need to invoke Demon Carbon. That is to say, to the degree that the hockey stick has a blade in the twentieth century, it would have another a millennium ago.

The theory has continued to take blows over the years since it was first presented. About a decade ago, a paper ^[1] was published by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunis claiming that there was good evidence that both the (still extant) MWP and current warming were driven by solar activity rather than carbon emissions. But these initial attacks were beaten back by the climate mafia (as we now know from the leaked emails ^[3] between Mann and his partners in crime in East Anglia from two and a half years ago). The real damage came when a retired Canadian mining engineer, Steve McIntyre, and a professor at the University of Guelph, Ross McKitrick, started digging into Mann’s methodology, and found flaws in both his statistical analysis and data interpretation, and published a paper ^[4] describing them in Geophysical Research Letters in 2005. They showed that Mann’s methodology would generate a hockey stick almost independently of the data input, by feeding it spectral noise ^[5]. Later, Internet satirist (and apparent statistician by day) Iowahawk provided a primer on how to create a hockey stick at home ^[6], using a standard spreadsheet program.

Defenders of the theory have long claimed that even if there are problems with Mann’s method or data set, we have independent results from other research, such as that at the CRU, that confirm it. But this was a point of contention. In addition to the unscientific behavior in attempting to silence critics and keep them from publishing, we also know that the climate “scientists” had been withholding data that would help to resolve the controversy (more unscientific behavior, because it makes it difficult or impossible to replicate claimed results, and behavior that continues to the present da ^[7]y by the University of Virginia), even in the face of numerous Freedom of Information requests, on both sides of the Atlantic.

To no avail, McIntyre had been requesting data for years from Briffa, who had claimed to have independent Eurasian tree-ring analysis that confirmed Mann’s results, from a data set called the Polar Urals (Mann’s work was based on ancient California bristlecone pine trees). Unfortunately, paleoclimatologists had discovered that the Polar Urals data didn’t actually support the disappearance of the MWP, so they were in search of another Eurasian data set that would, and they found one called Yamal, gathered and published in 2002 by two Russian scientists.

McIntyre had wanted to see it for years, and in 2008, utilizing a bylaw of the Royal Society, he enlisted their aid in forcing Briffa to finally start to release the data. Unfortunately, he still didn’t get enough, at least initially, to make any sense of it. But he did notice that, first, it had sparse data for the twentieth century and second, that it, unlike the typical treatment of such data sets, was not supplemented by any regional data — Briffa was using it by itself. When McIntyre did such a supplementation himself using other data (reluctantly) provided by Briffa, the twentieth-century hockey-stick blade completely disappeared.

That was where things stood in 2009, just before the so-called Climate-gate email and model leak. After that, the CRU actually started to pull down data ^[8] that had been previously available for years. It was clear from the emails that Briffa had been telling one story publicly and another privately as to his reasons for not including the devastating data, but the tide finally turned last month, when the University of East Anglia was finally forced by the British Information Commissioner to at least tell McIntyre which data sets were used in its results. Let’s let blogger “Bishop Hill” (aka Andrew Montford, who has written the book ^[9] on the subject) tell the rest of the story ^[10] (and read the whole thing for a detailed description of the deception):

The list of 17 sites that was finally sent to McIntyre represented complete vindication. The presence of Yamal and Polar Urals had already been obvious from the Climategate emails, but the list showed that Briffa had also incorporated the Polar Urals update (which, as we saw above, did not have a hockey stick shape, and which Briffa claimed he had not looked at since 1995) and the Khadtya River site, McIntyre’s use of which the RealClimate authors had ridiculed.
Although the chronology itself was not yet available, the list of sites was sufficient for McIntyre to calculate the numbers himself, and the results were breathtaking. Firstly, the URALS regional chronology had vastly more data behind it than the Yamal-only figures presented in Briffa’s paper
But what was worse, the regional chronology did not have a hockey stick shape — the twentieth century uptick that Briffa had got from the handful of trees in the Yamal-only series had completely disappeared.
Direct comparison of the chronology that Briffa chose to publish against the full chronology that he withheld makes the point clear:
It seems clear then that the URALS chronology Briffa prepared to go alongside the others he put together for the 2008 paper gave a message that did not comply with the message that he wanted to convey — one of unprecedented warmth at the end of the twentieth century. In essence the URALS regional chronology was suffering from the divergence problem — the widely noted failure of some tree ring series to pick up the recent warming seen in instrumental temperature records, which led to the infamous ‘hide the decline’ episode.
Remarkably, however, Briffa did allude to the divergence problem in his paper:

These [regional chronologies] show no evidence of a recent breakdown in [the association between tree growth and temperature] as has been found at other high-latitude Northern Hemisphere locations.

The reason for dropping the URALS chronology looks abundantly clear. It would not have supported this message.

His emphasis.
And new results are coming out almost by the day. Earlier this week, McIntyre reportedly received ^[11]new Yamal data, which continued to confirm that there is no blade to the stick
What does this all mean? First, let’s state what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that we know that the planet isn’t warming, and it doesn’t mean that if it is, that we can be sure that it is not due to human activity.

But at a minimum it should be the final blow to the hockey stick, and perhaps to the very notion that bristlecone pines and larches are accurate thermometers. It should also be a final blow to the credibility of many of the leading lights of climate “science,” but based on history, it probably won’t be, at least among the political class. What it really should be is the beginning of the major housecleaning necessary if the field is to have any scientific credibility, but that may have to await a general reformation of academia itself. It would help, though, if we get a new government next year that cuts off funding to such charlatans, and the institutions that whitewash their unscientific behavior.

A fitting end for chief American global warming shyster and alarmist, James Hansen

---

Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-death-of-the-hockey-stick/
URLs in this post:

[1] crockumentary: http://www.global-warming-and-the-climate.com/al-gore-documentary.htm

[2] bogus reports: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/02/climate-change-pachauri-un-glaciers

[3] leaked emails: http://pjmedia.com/blog/global-warminggate-the-science-is-unsettled/

[4] a paper: http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-grl-2005.pdf

[5] feeding it spectral noise: http://www.uoguelph.ca/%7Ermckitri/research/trc.html

[6] primer on how to create a hockey stick at home: http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/12/fables-of-the-reconstruction.html

[7] continues to the present da: http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/judge-adds-michael-%E2%80%98hockey-stick%E2%80%99-mann-uva-foia

[8] started to pull down data: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/14/whats-going-on-cru-takes-down-briffa-tree-ring-data-and-more/

[9] the book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Hockey-Stick-Illusion-Climategate/dp/1906768358

[10] tell the rest of the story: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/5/9/the-yamal-deception.html

[11] reportedly received : http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/15/mcintyre-gets-some-new-yamal-data-still-no-hockey-stick/

Lock Up The Climate Crooks And Throw Away The Keys

It is difficult to grasp how much money has been wasted and how much human suffering has been caused by the hoax surrounding the decades-long myth of man-caused global warming/climate change.

What began as an innocent-sounding and appearing effort to understand the world's weather systems and patterns and how these affect humans on Earth was morphed into a bottomless money drain on taxpayers in the form of endless government funding of ever-increasing ludicrous projects.  Billions and Billions (Trillions) of dollars or their equivalent have been largely wasted.  Job creation?  Hardly.  It is like paying someone to dig a hole and then having them fill it in.

What have any of these "climate studies", laws, treaties, taxes, caps, trades, etc. actually accomplished?  Are we any safer?  Are our lives any better?  Is there less flooding, fewer tornadoes, a stabilization of sea level, are polar bears any happier?  Is there less "pollution", is the air any cleaner, are the glaciers advancing, or retreating, coral reefs living or dying, do we even really know any of those things, if we did, do they matter?  Has anything been done other than enrich Al Gore and people like James Hansen, the taxpayer-paid, global warming fathers of global warming alarmism?  They ought to be arrested, tried before a well-publicized jury of ordinary people, and if guilty, fined to their last penny, and locked up forever.

As I see the United States sink farther and farther into debt, not to mention the rest of the world, and I see money wasted on projects like mandated wind energy, solar farms, electric vehicles, ethanol fuel from corn, and a host of other things that are uneconomic, impractical, and used by corrupt politicians to manipulate people and simply serve as a means of collecting more taxes, I become a tad bit irritated. 

I care about America.  I'm not being paid by "big bad oil" to share this material and my knowledge and experience, limited as it may be.  I simply care about the world and its people and I hate to see the future being ruined by these so-called "environmentalists" for future generations.  Honestly, it is not for me.  I don't have that many years left.  I don't like seeing people being conned and ripped off.  Everyone is in far greater debt, (and remember taxation and perpetual debt is a form of slavery.)  I trust nobody likes being a slave, even if it is just a partial slave, and especially not a slave to these "climate criminals".
Peter

source

Climate Criminal Peter Gleick and James Hansen in Racketeering Probe?

Written by John O'Sullivan, guest post | March 01 2012

James Hansen being arrested at Keystone protest sit-in.FBI agents are urged to grill others linked to self-confessed climate criminal, Dr. Peter Gleick in the 'Fakegate’ climate counterfeiting scandal. Evidence now points to NASA’s Dr. James Hansen as accomplice in global warming racket.

Dr. Peter Gleick resigned last Thursday as chairman of the American Geophysical Union's Task Force on Scientific Ethics. Ross Rice, an FBI agent and spokesman from the Chicago field office confirmed an FBI probe is under way, “We are currently working with the [Heartland] institute and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago.

Dr. Gleick's rapid fall from grace has mired other top tier climatologists in what may become a full-blown wire fraud and RICO racketeering investigation by federal authorities. Leading critics are sure that the elements of 18 USC 1343 appear already met under admitted facts.
Questions will now need to be asked about the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) role in enabling Hansen to make a notorious presentation to Congress on June 23, 1988; all thanks to a dubious ‘peer-reviewed’ paper of his that AGU brusquely shoehorned through.

Now identity thief Peter Gleick has been exposed as disseminating at least one forged document used to defame the Heartland Institute, a well-known free trade policy think tank. Gleick admitted to Huffington Post readers that he handled stolen documents. His intent was to injure others – a crime under U.S. Law. Actual financial harm occurred due to Gleick's unlawful release of Heartland's donor list and contributions; one donor has since withdrawn funding.

However, none of the documents distributed by Gleick (other than the fake strategy document) reveal any smoking guns against Heartland. But already, astute investigators have found a worrying link between Gleick, Dr. James Hansen and the AGU that may yet point to a real smoking gun in U.S. climate fraud racketeering from 1988.

Gleick, Hansen and the AGU Complicit in the 'Greatest Crime'
Hansen's paper, foretelling of a world of catastrophic man-made global warming was 'peer reviewed’ to sway an otherwise skeptical Congress. The AGU is thus a vehicle of dubious patronage.

Hansen misled elected officials by deceitfully claiming that carbon dioxide (CO2) from ocean out-gassing and other natural vents has different carbon ratios 'signature' than human 'fossil fuel' emissions. Hansen then successfully duped policymakers into believing human CO2 emissions were linked to global warming. But the truth is that there is no way to distinguish between natural or man-made sources of CO2. Hansen's paper was thus not up to the scientific standard necessary for publication and should never have passed proper peer review.

Thus Hansen’s Congressional charade precipitated the U.S. government’s resolve to fight global ‘greenhouse gas’ warming and blow $100 billion tackling a proven non-problem (despite 30 percent rises in carbon dioxide emissions global temperatures have fallen this century).

Federal agents now have a green light to apply RICO statutes, designed to root out racketeering, based on the following facts:
As a self-confessed climate criminal Dr. Peter Gleick faces incarceration. He has already admitted to being implicated in identity theft, stealing private documents and falsifying evidence to defame, and thus injure the Heartland Institute and others. Gleick is linked via the AGU to Hansen's 1988 paper and by association to other scientists suspected of fraud (inc. hockey stick graph conjurer, Michael Mann).
Over the decades such unprincipled alarmists stand accused of filching millions in taxpayer funds by exploiting public fears in a phony global warming narrative.

How RICO Statutes May Be Applied
If the FBI can show that a fraudulent AGW narrative was knowingly implemented by Gleick, Hansen and other key players, then not only can prosecutions for racketeering be swiftly implemented, but the whole climate science house of cards will collapse.

Federal law sets out the meaning of racketeering activity under 18 U.S.C. § 1961. Identity theft and the fraudulent creation of documents that Gleick dishonestly attributed to Heartland clearly qualifies his crimes as possible racketeering offenses under RICO.

To sustain convictions a pattern of racketeering activity must first be established. This requires the FBI to produce evidence that Gleick, AGU and/or other co-conspirators have engaged in at least two acts of racketeering activity. The law requires that investigators tie together such acts within 10 years of each other.

The burden for prosecutors is not a light one but these riders of the global warming gravy train may well fit the bill as per the test applied by the U.S. Supreme Court. This is the 'continuity-plus-relationship test' applied to determine whether the facts of a specific case give rise to an established pattern.

U.S. Supreme Court guidelines state that co-conspirators "have the same or similar purposes, results, participants, victims, or methods of commission, or otherwise are interrelated by distinguishing characteristics and are not isolated events." (H.J. Inc. v. Northwestern Bell Telephone Co.)

Where Does Climate Politics and Law Go From Here?
Other experts share my opinion that there is sufficient probable cause to follow through with a thorough in-depth federal investigation into the Gleick ’Fakegate’ case to see how far the 'post-normal' climate cancer has spread. Certainly, Peter Gleick should be offered a plea bargain deal if he rats out the other racketeers.

Apologists for climate criminals will not be curbed until the leaders of this 'post normal' academic cult are jailed. But whether the Obama government has the stomach to follow through and permit such prosecutions remains to be seen, as Chicago FBI agent, Ross Rice hinted:
“Whether Gleick, a member of the U.S. intellectual elite and a former student and coauthor with John Holdren, Obama’s Science Adviser, is ever charged is a different issue than whether his acts meet the elements of 18 USC 1343.”

Skeptics have already seen how the British police have stalled for two years despite admissions by one British climatologist of his climate crimes (Dr. Phil Jones could still feasibly be prosecuted under the UK Fraud Act).

If national governments won’t put a stop to it then state prosecutors and civil litigants likely will. Indeed, Glieck's crimes may also be prosecuted under California law. Section 528.5 to the Penal Code deals specifically with such impersonation (SB 1411: Internet Impersonation).
While over in Virginia, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is a high-profile prosecutor adamant he will continue the fight on behalf of the Commonwealth’s taxpayers and expose Michael Mann's hidden misdeeds.

Meanwhile, in Vancouver popular skeptic climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball is making strides defending vexatious libel suits filed separately by Dr. Michael Mann and Dr. Andrew Weaver. History will eventually join all such pieces of the puzzle to show how just extensive the climate fraud truly was.

Global Warming: A Massive Rip-Off Of American Taxpayers

The waste of BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars on the global warming scam is an atrocity.  Consider this in light of the current economic recession we are enduring.  Consider jobs lost, massive and increasing government debt, and a loss of trust in science and the integrity of "scientists".  We don't really expect politicians like Al Gore and people running the United Nations to feel any shame, but what about so-called scientists like Michael Mann of Penn State or James Hansen of NASA?  Scientists, like Doctors, especially those being supported by tax dollars, are supposed to operate under the strictest measures of honesty.   There can be no manipulation of data, no politicking, no lying; but that is not what has been happening since the beginning of the push to "stop global warming".

A scientist who lies about his data is no scientist.  They're bought and paid for and can be equated with those who practice what some call "the world's oldest profession".  In other words, they are whores.  All of the honest scientists in the world, myself included, should be outraged by the actions of the immoral few.  All of the non-scientists should be embarrassed and alarmed that they have been so easily misled by the prophets of global warming and environmental catastrophe.

Read the following article and weep.
Peter

U.S. Funds Nearly 50% -- $31 Million -- of U.N.’s Global Warming Panel

By Elizabeth Harrington

January 3, 2012

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/us-funds-nearly-50-31-million-un-s-global-warming-panel

                                    Global Warming Liar In Chief -- Al Gore


(CNSNews.com) – A study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined that the United States funded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ authority on alleged man-made global warming, with $31.1 million since 2001, nearly half of the panel’s annual budget.



The GAO also found that this funding information “was not available in budget documents or on the websites of the relevant federal agencies, and the agencies are generally not required to report this information to Congress.”



In a Nov. 17, 2011 report, “International Climate Change Assessments: Federal Agencies Should Improve Reporting and Oversight of U.S. Funding,” the GAO found that the State Department provided $19 million for administrative and other expenses, while the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) provided $12.1 million in technical support through the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), averaging an annual $3.1 million to the IPCC over 10 years -- $31.1 million so far.



The IPCC runs an annual budget of $7 million, according to the Wall Street Journal, making the United States a major benefactor for its global warming agenda.

                             IPCC  Chairman Hairma Rajendra-Pa. (AP Photo)

An international body, the IPCC was created in 1988. Though thousands of scientists contribute to the panel, only 11 working members support the organization. Set up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the IPCC is an “effort by the United Nations to provide the governments of the world with a clear scientific view of what is happening to the world’s climate,” according to its Web site.



The organization has been the subject of controversy in the last several years when thousands of e-mails from the University of East Anglia's (UEA) Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were stolen and released in 2009, and again in November 2011, on the eve of climate talks in Durban, South Africa.



The e-mails included those between Michael Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University and author of the infamous “hockey stick” graph that apparently showed global temperatures reaching “unprecedented” levels, and Phil Jones, director at CRU, which brought into question the validity of the IPCC’s work, with the reported statements “hide the decline,” and “Mike’s Nature Trick.”



In explaining its reason for auditing U.S. funding of the IPCC, the GAO said, “Interest in IPCC’s activities increased after the theft of e-mails among IPCC scientists was made public, and with the discovery of several errors in its 2007 set of reports.”


The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), released in 2007, included several errors, including claims that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by the year 2035, which the IPCC, in a statement, later admitted was based on inconclusive data.



After facing “key challenges” in determining the amount of funding to the IPCC, the GAO now recommends that U.S. funding be reported annually to Congress with “accurate and consistent information.”



The report said documents on U.S. financing for the IPCC were “not available in budget documents or on the websites of the relevant federal agencies, and the agencies are generally not required to report this information to Congress.”



Conflicting State Department numbers also made it more difficult for the GAO to assemble the data. The GAO “reviewed documents and interviewed officials from federal agencies and IPCC” to reach its findings.



A 2005 GAO report entitled “Federal Reports on Climate Change Funding Should Be Clearer and More Complete” found that federal funding for climate change was not adequately accountable. “Congress and the public cannot consistently track federal climate change funding or spending over time,” the report concluded.



The report also found federal funding for global warming had increased by 116 percent between 1993 and 2004, to $5.1 billion.



The $3.1 million annual U.S. funding goes towards the IPCC’s “core activities”: meetings of the governing bodies, co-ordination meetings, support for the developing country co-chairs, the IPCC Web site and Secretariat. The IPCC assesses scientific information, but does not conduct any research of its own.



According to the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, the United States “has made the world’s largest scientific investment in the areas of climate change and global change research” with a total of nearly $20 billion over the past 13 years.

TOP SCIENTIFIC ADVISOR TO AL GORE.......

PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE

NASA'S JAMES HANSEN

Climategate 2.0 — The NASA Files: U.S. Climate Science as Corrupt as CRU

Written by Christopher Horner, Pajamas Media 17 February 2010

Hansen: Never answered a FOIA he didn't like.

In August 2007, I submitted two Freedom of Information Act requests to NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), headed by long-time Gore advisor James Hansen and his right-hand man Gavin Schmidt (and RealClimate.org co-founder).

I did this because Canadian businessman Steve McIntyre — a man with professional experience investigating suspect statistical claims in the mining industry and elsewhere, including his exposure of the now-infamous “hockey stick” graph — noticed something unusual with NASA’s claims of an ever-warming first decade of this century. NASA appeared to have inflated its U.S. temperatures beginning in the year 2000. My FOIA request asked NASA about their internal discussions regarding whether and how to correct the temperature error caught by McIntyre.

NASA stonewalled my request for more than two years, until Climategate prompted me to offer notice of intent to sue if NASA did not comply immediately.

On New Year’s Eve, NASA finally provided the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) with the documents I requested in August 2007.

The emails show the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and suspect data management and integrity of NASA, wildly spinning in defense of their enterprise. The emails show NASA making off with enormous sums of taxpayer funding doing precisely what they claim only a “skeptic” would do. The emails show NASA attempting to scrub their website of their own documents, and indeed they quietly pulled down numerous press releases grounded in the proven-wrong data. The emails show NASA claiming that their own temperature errors (which they have been caught making and in uncorrected form aggressively promoting) are merely trivial, after years of hysterically trumpeting much smaller warming anomalies.

As you examine the email excerpts below, as well as those which I will discuss in the upcoming three parts of this series, bear in mind that the contents of these emails were intended to prop up the argument for the biggest regulatory intervention in history: the restricting of carbon emissions from all human activity. NASA’s activist scientists leave no doubt in their emails that this was indeed their objective. Also, please note that these documents were responsive to a specific FOIA request from two years ago. Recent developments — combined with admissions contained in these documents — beg further requests, which have both been already filed and with more forthcoming.

Furthermore, on January 29, 2010, CEI filed our appeal of NASA continuing to improperly withhold other documents responsive to our FOIA requests. In this appeal we informed NASA that if they do not comply by the twentieth day, as required by law, we shall exercise our appellate rights in court immediately.

________________________________

Under Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), NASA shepherds a continuing public campaign claiming clear evidence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) — climate change induced by human beings. The documents released via the FOIA request, however, contain admissions of data unreliability that are staggering, particularly in light of NASA’s claims to know temperatures and anomalies within hundredths of a degree, and the alarm they helped raise over a mere one degree of claimed warming over more than an entire century.

Dr. Reto Ruedy, a Hansen colleague at GISS, complains in his August 3, 2007, email to his co-worker at GISS and RealClimate blogger Gavin Schmidt:

[The United States Historical Climate Network] data are not routinely kept up-to-date (at this point the (sic) seem to end in 2002).

This lapse led to wild differences in data claimed to be from the same ground stations by USHCN and the Global Climate Network (GHCN). NASA later trumpeted the “adjustments” they made to this data (upward only, of course) in extremely minor amounts — adjustments they are now seen admitting are well within any uncertainty, a fact that received significantly less emphasis in their public media campaign claiming anomalous, man-made warming.

GISS’s Ruedy then wrote:

[NASA’s] assumption that the adjustments made the older data consistent with future data … may not have been correct. … Indeed, in 490 of the 1057 stations the USHCN data were up to 1C colder than the corresponding GHCN data, in 77 stations the data were the same, and in the remaining 490 stations the USHCN data were warmer than the GHCN data.

Ruedy claimed this introduced an estimated warming into the record of 0.1 deg C. Ruedy then described an alternate way of manipulating the temperature data, “a more careful method” they might consider using, instead.

Read rest…

CO2 and Global Climate Change: Separating Fact, From (Hansen's) Personal Opinion

The following is a very well-written and documented critique of testimony given by James Hansen of NASA, considered the foremost advocate of human caused global warming and climate change. The critique is detailed, and I believe, objective and accurate.

A major conclusion of the critique is that Hansen often confuses, and intertwines his personal opinion unsupported by sound and accurate science. This is well -documented in the critique. I am only reproducing a portion of it here. The remainder can be viewed in html format, or downloaded and saved in pdf format.

The critique addresses the major scientific issues related to the complex subject of global warming. Since the subject is one of such importance, it is well worth studying.
Peter


from: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/current_issue.html

Carbon Dioxide and Global Change: Separating Scientific Fact from Personal Opinion

A critique of the 26 April 2007 testimony of James E. Hansen made to the Select Committee of Energy Independence and Global Warming of the United States House of Representatives entitled "Dangerous Human-Made Interference with Climate"

Prepared by Sherwood B. Idso and Craig D. Idso Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change 6 June 2007

In the materials that follow, we present such a comparison, focusing on a number of key subjects addressed by Hansen. These topics include:
(1) ice sheet disintegration,
(2) sea level trends,
(3) atmospheric methane concentrations,
(4) climates of the past,
(5) predicted warming-induced extinctions of terrestrial plants and animals,
(6) the CO2-induced preservation of terrestrial species, and
(7) predicted CO2-induced extinctions of calcifying marine organisms.

In addition, we discuss a number of other topics that Hansen addresses in less detail, including: (1) positive vs. negative climate feedbacks,
(2) effects of drought on agriculture in a CO2-enriched world,
(3) sea level rise over the next hundred years,
(4) the adaptability of living organisms to rising sea levels,
(5) the "dangerous" level of atmospheric CO2,
(6) the magnitude of climate forcing due to a doubling of the air's CO2 content,
(7) empirical evaluations of earth's climate sensitivity,
(8-10) the ability of man to control global climate,
(11-14) the need to act now to reduce CO2 emissions, and
(15) the role of morality in the debate over what to do, or not do, about anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

And when Hansen's testimony is compared with what has been revealed by the scientific investigations of a diverse assemblage of highly competent researchers in a wide variety of academic disciplines, we find that he paints a very different picture of the role of anthropogenic CO2 emissions in shaping the future fortunes of man and nature alike than what is suggested by that larger body of work.

The Basis for Hansen's Testimony
Hansen's testimony is divided into five parts: (1) Summary, (2) Basis for Testimony, (3) Crystallizing Science, (4) Metrics for Dangerous Climate Change, and (5) Four-Point Strategy to Stabilize Climate. We will begin our critique of the document with a brief analysis of what Hansen says is its foundation, i.e., his Section 2: Basis for Testimony.

Six papers in various stages of preparation for publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals form the basis for Hansen's testimony. The first, written by Hansen and 46 co-authors, is entitled "Dangerous human-made interference with climate: A GISS modelE study" and is listed as being "in press" in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

The second paper, written by Hansen and five co-authors, is entitled "Climate change and trace gases" and is listed as being "in press" in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. The third paper, also written by Hansen and 46 co-authors, is entitled "Climate simulations for 1880-2003 with GISS modelE" and is listed as being "in press" in Climate Dynamics.

The fourth paper, written by Hansen alone, is entitled "Scientific reticence and sea level rise" and is listed as being "accepted for publication" by Environmental Research Letters. The fifth paper, again by Hansen alone, is entitled "State of the wild: Perspective of a climatologist" and is listed as being "accepted" by an unnamed journal.

The sixth paper, where Hansen appears as the second of two authors, is entitled "Implications of 'peak oil' for atmospheric CO2 and climate" and is listed as being a "first draft" prepared for Geophysical Research Letters.

In perusing these manuscripts, it is readily apparent they either deal with, or are based upon, scenario-driven climate-model projections, which obviously can be no better than the physics, chemistry and biology upon which they are based, as well as the scenarios that drive them.

To be of any prognostic value, therefore, the models must include, and correctly characterize, all of the physical, chemical and biological phenomena that significantly impact the planet's climate, which is something most climate modelers would probably admit they have not yet achieved to the degree they would like. But are they close enough?

Our only way of answering this question is to see if what the models portend about the future compares favorably with what they suggest about the past. Of course, the models could accidentally give the "right answers," but there is no other course of action we can take at the present time; and, hence, this is what we will do in evaluating Hansen's testimony, for if the models give the wrong answers about the recent past, we can be confident they are not up to the task of correctly inferring the future.

Analyzing Hansen's "Crystallizing Science"
The core concept of Hansen's testimony is that the earth "is close to dangerous climate change, to tipping points of the system with the potential for irreversible deleterious effects." However, this contention, like the many other claims Hansen makes, is neither a self-evident verity nor a proven fact. It is merely an opinion. And to raise it to a loftier status requires that there be real-world evidence for the changes the climate models suggest should occur in response to increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations and rising air temperatures.

This requirement is all the more justified in light of the fact that air temperatures of the last quarter-century are typically claimed by climate alarmists to have been unprecedented for at least the past two thousand years (Mann and Jones, 2003; Mann et al., 2003) - and possibly for close to a million years, if one believes Hansen et al. (2006) - while the atmosphere's current CO2 concentration is greater than it may have been for tens of millions of years (Pagani et al., 1999).

So what are the major climate changes and associated catastrophic consequences that are suggested by the climate models? And are there any signs they may already be in process of developing? The "sharpest criterion" for defining dangerous climate change, in the words of Hansen, "is probably maintenance of long-term sea level close to the present level," and in this regard he says that "sea level is already rising at a rate of 3.5 cm per decade and the rate is accelerating [our italics]," due, he would have us believe, to "ice sheet disintegration."

But are there any real-world data to support this claim?
Ice Sheet Disintegration
A good perspective on this issue is provided in the 16 March 2007 issue of Science by Shepherd and Wingham (2007), who review what is known about sea-level contributions arising from wastage of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets, focusing on the results of 14 different satellite-based estimates of the imbalances of the polar ice sheets that have been derived since 1998. These studies have been of three major types - standard mass budget analyses, altimetry measurements of ice-sheet volume changes, and measurements of the ice sheets' changing gravitational attraction - and they have yielded a diversity of values, ranging from an implied sea-level rise of 1.0 mm/year to a sea-level fall of 0.15 mm/year. Based on their evaluation of these diverse findings, the two researchers come to the conclusion that the current "best estimate" of the contribution of polar ice wastage to global sea level change is a rise of 0.35 millimeters per year, which over a century amounts to only 35 millimeters, or less than an inch and a half.

Yet even this small sea level rise may be unrealistically large, for although two of Greenland's biggest outlet glaciers doubled their mass-loss rates in 2004, causing many to claim that the Greenland Ice Sheet was responding more rapidly to global warming than expected, Howat et al. (2007) report that the glaciers' mass-loss rates "decreased in 2006 to near the previous rates." And these observations, in their words, "suggest that special care must be taken in how mass-balance estimates are evaluated, particularly when extrapolating into the future, because short-term spikes could yield erroneous long-term trends."

Other findings also contradict Hansen's claim that "increasingly rapid changes on West Antarctica and Greenland ... are truly alarming." Writing in the 30 March 2007 issue of Science, for example, Anandakrishnan et al. (2007) describe a sedimentary wedge or "till delta" deposited by and under West Antarctica's Whillans Ice Stream that they detected via radar surveys made from the floating Ross Ice Shelf. This grounding-line buildup of sedimentary material, as they describe it, "serves to thicken the ice and stabilize the position of the grounding line," so that "the ice just up-glacier of the grounding line is substantially thicker than that needed to allow floatation." Consequently, they say that "the grounding-line will tend to remain in the same location ... until sea level rises enough to overcome the excess thickness that is due to the wedge."

So how high would the sea need to rise to "unground" the Whillans Ice Stream and wrest it from the continent? In a study that analyzes this question in detail, Alley et al. (2007) find that "sea-level changes of a few meters are unlikely to substantially affect ice-sheet behavior," and they conclude that a rise on the order of 100 meters might be needed to "overwhelm the stabilizing feedback from sedimentation." In fact, Anderson (2007) states that "at the current rate of sea-level rise, it would take several thousand years [our italics] to float the ice sheet off [its] bed." What is more, Alley et al. say that the ice sheet's extra thickness up-glacier from the grounding-line wedge will tend to stabilize it against "any other environmental perturbation."

With respect to the range of applicability of the findings of Anandakrishnan et al. and Alley et al., Anderson notes that "grounding-zone wedges are common features on the continental shelf, including the Ross Sea Shelf," and that "all ice streams of the Siple Coast have an anomalous elevation and stop at the grounding line," which leads him to conclude that "this mechanism for stabilization of the grounding-line is likely to be widespread." Consequently, Anderson concludes that "sea-level rise may not destabilize ice sheets as much as previously feared," which in turn suggests that sea level itself may not rise as fast or as high as previously feared. So what do actual sea level data suggest?

(continued here: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/current_issue.html

Advocacy In The Guise of Climate Science.....Hansen Revealed For What He Is......

It is pretty clear in the following commentary that Dr. Pielke is no follower of James Hansen of NASA. Read the following and see if you agree with the alarmist nature of Hansen's paper and its obvious advocacy for a his personal agenda. This is science being used for political purposes at its most blatant.
Peter


Advocacy In The Guise Of Climate Science - A New Paper That Exemplifies This Approach
Filed under: Climate Science Reporting, Climate Science Misconceptions — Roger Pielke Sr. @ 7:00 am
There is a new paper that presents a claim that the Earth’s climate system is dominated by positive radiative feedbacks, and that includes the heading in section of the paper “Planet Earth today: imminent peril”. This sensationalism, however, in the view of Climate Science, is unsubstantiated by examining even the most basic of measures, where if the 2007 values of the IPCC radiative forcing are accepted, and the observed ocean heat storage data is used to diagnose what has been the sum total of real world radiative forcings and feedbacks in the last few decades, the climate feedbacks have been negative (as is discussed below)! This contradicts the fundamental premise of the paper.

Hansen, J., M. Sato, P. Kharecha G. Russell, D. W. Lea, M. Siddall, 2007: Climate change and trace gases; Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2007) 365, 1925–1954 doi:10.1098/rsta.2007.2052 Published online 18 May 2007.
The abstract reads,
“Palaeoclimate data show that the Earth’s climate is remarkably sensitive to global forcings. Positive feedbacks predominate. This allows the entire planet to be whipsawed between climate states. One feedback, the ‘albedo flip’ property of ice/water, provides a powerful trigger mechanism. A climate forcing that ‘flips’ the albedo of a sufficient portion of an ice sheet can spark a cataclysm. Inertia of ice sheet and ocean provides only moderate delay to ice sheet disintegration and a burst of added global warming. Recent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of our control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the largest human-made climate forcing, but other trace constituents are also important.

Only intense simultaneous efforts to slow CO2 emissions and reduce non-CO2 forcings can keep climate within or near the range of the past million years. The most important of the non-CO2 forcings is methane (CH4), as it causes the second largest human-made GHG climate forcing and is the principal cause of increased tropospheric ozone (O3), which is the third largest GHG forcing. Nitrous oxide (N2O) should also be a focus of climate mitigation efforts. Black carbon (‘black soot’) has a high global warming potential (approx. 2000, 500 and 200 for 20, 100 and 500 years, respectively) and deserves greater attention. Some forcings are especially effective at high latitudes, so concerted efforts to reduce their emissions could preserve Arctic ice,while also having major benefits for human health, agricultural productivity and the global environment.”

One statement in the conclusion reads,
“Earth’s climate is remarkably sensitive to forcings, i.e. imposed changes of the planet’s energy balance. Both fast and slow feedbacks turn out to be predominately positive. As a result, our climate has the potential for large rapid fluctuations. Indeed, the Earth, and the creatures struggling to exist on the planet, have been repeatedly whipsawed between climate states.”
This is obviously an erroneous statement! If all of the feedbacks were predominately positive, the climate would long ago evolved to a a very extreme state. This clearly has not occurred, and such statements in this article are unsubstantiated scientifically in the paper, and, even more importantly, fail to represented the dynamics of the current climate system, where, as has been summarized on Climate Science, the net effect of all of the feedbacks, assuming the 2007 IPCC estimate of climate forcings is correct, is negative!

That the feedbacks must be negative in recent years (or the 2007 IPCC net forcing is in error) is discussed in
The Net Climate Feedbacks Must Be A Negative Effect On The Global Average Radiative Imbalance If The IPCC Conclusion Of Net Anthropogenic Radiative Forcings Is Correct.
Just two excerpts from the paper are needed to recognize what the Hansen et al paper is all about, i.e.

“The Arctic epitomizes the global climate situation. The most rapid feasible slowdown of CO2 emissions, coupled with focused reductions of other forcings, may just have a chance of avoiding disastrous climate change.”
and

“The potential of these ‘amber waves of grain’ and coastal facilities for permanent underground storage ‘from sea to shining sea’ to help restore America’s technical prowess, moral authority and prestige, for the sake of our children and grandchildren, in the course of helping to solve the climate problem, has not escaped our attention.”

This paper is clearly an advocacy article using the guise of cherrypicked science to promote a particular political and policy agenda. It very much fits into the definition of “stealth issue advocacy” as discussed in

Pielke, R. A. Jr., 2007: The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and PoliticsRoger A., Jr. University of Colorado, Boulder
The Hansen et al paper is clearly not an example of serving as an honest broker of climate science.

Hansen et al, of course, are correct that the climate system is nonlinear and sudden transitions on a variety of space and time scales do occur, as we discussed in
Rial, J., R.A. Pielke Sr., M. Beniston, M. Claussen, J. Canadell, P. Cox, H. Held, N. de Noblet-Ducoudre, R. Prinn, J. Reynolds, and J.D. Salas, 2004: Nonlinearities, feedbacks and critical thresholds within the Earth’s climate system. Climatic Change, 65, 11-38.

The Hansen et al article, however oversimplifies the climate system as being dominated by the radiative effect of human added CO2. Such a perturbation, of course, just as easily could move us away from undesirable climate transitions, instead of toward such transitions. Prudence suggests that we work to minimize our disturbance of the climate system since we do not understand the climate system well enough.

However, to focus on just a small subset of forcings is seriously misleading policymakers on the most effective way to deal with our social and environmental vulnerability from the entire spectrum of the actual environmental risks and other threats that we face.

NASA's James Hansen Finally Releases Climate Data Computer Codes

This summarizes the brewing controversy about NASA's temperature data, how it is collected and manipulated. It serves as the basis for the idea of man-caused global warming. If the data is bad, how good can the predictions be?
Peter

This photo show an example of a weather station collecting temperature data, note the location of the temperature sensor near the air conditioning unit which pumps out hot air. Is this going to result in accurate data?

from: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/09/08/nasa-s-james-hansen-finally-releases-climate-data-computer-codes

NASA’s James Hansen Finally Releases Climate Data Computer Codes
By Noel Sheppard September 8, 2007 - 16:00 ET
Much as when the organization he leads quietly made changes to the United States historical climate record at the prodding of Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre, James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies finally released critical computer codes scientists have wanted for years, but did so with absolutely no official press release.

As a result, not one media outlet covered this occurrence that years from now could be seen as a huge turning point in the climate change debate.

Despite the secrecy, there was great celebration amongst anthropogenic global warming skeptics that have wanted these closely held codes to be able to identify how NASA and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration make adjustments to raw climate data collected by weather stations.

One such skeptic is Anthony Watts, who happily reported Saturday (emphasis added):
Apparently us "court jesters" (as as Dr. James Hansen calls us) carry some weight after all.

I'm happy to report that NASA GISS has in fact released the computer code used to arrive at temperature adjustments for the USA and the world. The first task is to make sure it matches what has been seen, and to verify that we have all of it. This is hugely important in doing independent verification of the surface temperature record. Following that, an analysis of the methodology and replication of the computer program output to see if it matches the current data sets. Then perhaps we can fully understand why some stations that are in "pristine" condition, such as Walhalla, SC, with no obvious microsite biases, get "adjusted" by Hansen's techniques. Shouldn't good data stand on it's [sic] own?

Yes, that sounds reasonable, Anthony, unless your goal is to manipulate the data to support your agenda.

Of course, another happy skeptic was Stephen McIntyre who reported the news at Climate Audit (h/t Anthony Watts, emphasis added):
Hansen has just released what is said to be the source code for their temperature analysis. The release was announced in a shall-we-say ungracious email to his email distribution list and a link is now present at the NASA webpage.

Hansen says resentfully that they would have liked a "week or two" to make a "simplified version" of the program and that it is this version that "people interested in science" will want, as opposed to the version that actually generated their results.

People interested in science? Heck, I thought we were all deniers and court jesters.
Regardless, it seems a metaphysical certitude that the same media which ignored the changes to the climate record a month ago will be equally disinterested in reporting this information.
And, if it turns out that Watts, McIntyre, and skeptical scientists around the world identify errors in these codes requiring additional changes be made by Hansen to the climate record, I doubt we'll hear about that either.
Or am I just being too darned cynical for my own good?
—Noel Sheppard is an economist, business owner, and Associate Editor of NewsBusters.

James Hansen, NASA Temperature Data Scandal, Media Bias......

This interesting information about the NASA Scientist (James Hansen) in charge of collecting and interpreting temperature data used in computer climate models that predict global warming and catastrophic climate change. Can you read this and not smell a rat?

We need some hard information supporting all of these claims, and if these things turn out to be factual, which I think they are, they need to be broadcast far and wide.

Peter


Author
Message
GCB Stokes
Message #6109/09/07 03:17 AM
Here is a little something on Hansen and another politically involved researcher, and the global warming bias news media.
Former NBC newsman, Tom Brokaw who has been affiliated with the Sierra Club and has recently lavished praise on former Vice President Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth.” Brokaw, who called Gore’s film “stylish and compelling”, has called the science behind catastrophic human caused global warming ‘irrefutable.” Brokaw also chose to ignore all 60 scientists who wrote to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in April of 2006 questioning the science of climate alarmism.

Brokaw’s partisan environmental credentials are so firmly established that the former anchor was offered a job in the Clinton-Gore Administration to be the director of the National Park Service in 1993. According to the Washington Post, Brokaw ‘very seriously’ considered the offer at the time but decided to remain with NBC News. "I have a lot of friends in the environmental movement,” Brokaw said. Brokaw’s wife also serves as vice president of the environmental group Conservation International.

In his new Discovery Channel special, Brokaw does not disclose the potential and known biases of the scientists he chose to feature. For example, Brokaw presents NASA’s James Hansen as an authority on climate change without revealing to viewers the extensive political and financial ties that Hansen has to Democratic Party partisans. Hansen, the director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, received a $250,000 grant from the charitable foundation headed and controlled by former Democrat Presidential candidate John Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz.

Subsequent to the Heinz Foundation grant, Hansen publicly endorsed Democrat John Kerry for president in 2004, a political endorsement considered to be highly unusual for a NASA scientist. Hansen also has acted as a consultant to Gore's slide-show presentations on global warming, on which Gore’s movie is based. Hansen also very actively promoted Gore and his movie, even appearing at a New York City Town Hall meeting with Gore and several Hollywood producers in May.

Hansen also wrote in an article in the journal Natural Science in 2003 that the use of “extreme scenarios" to dramatize climate change “may have been appropriate at one time” to drive the public's attention to the issue a disturbing admission by a prominent scientist.

Brokaw’s special also features Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. Brokaw once again fails to disclose Oppenheimer’s partisan and ideological affiliations to viewers. Brokaw fails to note that Oppenheimer actively campaigned against President George Bush in 2004 and, like Hansen, endorsed Senator Kerry for president. Oppenheimer was affiliated with the partisan group Scientists and Engineers for Change and the green group Environment2004 financially bankrolled in part by the Heinz Foundation where Teresa Heinz-Kerry serves as the chairwoman.

Environment2004, which put up billboards in Florida mocking President Bush in the final months of the 2004 presidential election. Viewers of Brokaw’s program will not be informed that Oppenheimer personally donated to the group Environment2004, a group that was so partisan it encouraged visitors to their Webpage to “get involved” in defeating President Bush.

In addition, Oppenheimer also serves as a "science advisor" to the left wing and politically charged group Environmental Defense and was a co-founder of Climate Action Network. Finally, Oppenheimer appeared with Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio and Gore’s movie producer Laurie David on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show.

NASA Website On Temperature Data

NASA's web site on temperature data. Save and refer back to this.
Peter

from: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

GISS Surface Temperature Analysis What's New
Posted November 2006 data and updated new animations (Dec. 14, 2006)
(July 11, 2005)
The NASA GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) provides a measure of the changing global surface temperature with monthly resolution for the period since 1880, when a reasonably global distribution of meteorological stations was established. Input data for the analysis, collected by many national meteorological services around the world, is the unadjusted data of the Global Historical Climatology Network (Peterson and Vose, 1997 and 1998) except that the USHCN station records up to 1999 were replaced by a version of USHCN data with further corrections after an adjustment computed by comparing the common 1990-1999 period of the two data sets. (We wish to thank Stephen McIntyre for bringing to our attention that such an adjustment is necessary to prevent creating an artificial jump in year 2000.)

These data were augmented by SCAR data from Antarctic stations not present in GHCN. Documentation of our analysis is provided by Hansen et al. (1999), with several modifications described by Hansen et al. (2001). The GISS analysis is updated monthly.

We modify the GHCN/USHCN/SCAR data in two stages to get to the station data on which all our tables, graphs, and maps are based: in stage 1 we try to combine at each location the time records of the various sources; in stage 2 we adjust the non-rural stations in such a way that their longterm trend of annual means is as close as possible to that of the mean of the neighboring rural stations. Non-rural stations that cannot be adjusted are dropped.

Our analysis includes results for a global temperature index as described by Hansen et al. (1996). The temperature index is formed by combining the meteorological station measurements over land with sea surface temperatures obtained primarily from satellite measurements, the HadISST data. Any uses of the temperature index data, i.e., the results including sea surface temperatures, should credit Reynolds, Rayner, Smith, et.al (2002). (See references.)

We limit our analysis to the period since 1880 because of the poor spatial coverage of stations prior to that time and the reduced possibility of checking records against those of nearby neighbors. Meteorological station data provide a useful indication of temperature change in the Northern Hemisphere extratropics for a few decades prior to 1880, and there are a small number of station record s that extend back to previous centuries. However, we believe that analyses for these earlier years need to be carried out on a station by station basis with an attempt to discern the method and reliability of measurements at each station, a task beyond the scope of our analysis. Global studies of still earlier times depend upon incorporation of proxy measures of temperature change. References to such studies are provided in Hansen et al. (1999).
Annual Summations
NASA news releases about the GISS surface temperature analysis are available for 2006, 2005, and 2004.
We also provide here discussions of global surface temperature trends for 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, and 2001.
Table Data: Global and Zonal Mean Anomalies dTs
Anomaly values indicate difference from the corresponding 1951-1980 means.
Table of global-mean monthly, annual and seasonal dTs based on met.station data, 1880-present, updated through most recent month
Table of N. Hemi-mean monthly, annual and seasonal dTs based on met.station data, 1880-present, updated through most recent month
Table of S. Hemi-mean monthly, annual and seasonal dTs based on met.station data, 1880-present, updated through most recent month
Table of global-mean monthly, annual and seasonal land-ocean temperature index, 1880-present, updated through most recent month
Table of zonal-mean annual dTs, 1880-present, updated through most recent completed year
Table of zonal-mean annual land-ocean temperature index, 1880-present, updated through most recent completed year
Gridded Monthly Maps of Temperature Anomaly Data
Users interested in the entire gridded temperature anomaly data may download the three basic binary files from our ftp site. Also available there are two sample FORTRAN programs, "SBBX_to_1x1.f" and "sbbx2nc.f", which demonstrate how you can extract gridded anomaly files for any month and year from the larger datasets.
Data files for individual years may be obtained from the ftp site's subdirectories: bin for binary format, txt for ASCII text, and netcdf for netCDF. However, these files are updated irregularly and the latest year or two of annual data might not be available.

Anomalies and Absolute Temperatures
Our analysis concerns only temperature anomalies, not absolute temperatures. The temperature anomaly tells us how much warmer or colder than normal it is at a particular place and point in time, the 'normal temperature' being the mean over many (30) years (same place, same time of year). It seems obvious that to find the anomaly, you first have to know the current and normal absolute temperatures. This is correct for the temperature at one fixed spot (the location of one thermometer), but not true at all for regional mean temperatures.
Whereas the individual reading represents just this spot but can be very different from nearby readings, the anomaly computed from those readings is much less dependent on location, elevation, wind patterns etc; it turns out to be representative for a region that covers several square miles. Hence we can combine anomalies from various stations to find regional mean anomalies. Regional absolute temperatures however cannot be obtained from observations alone. For a more detailed discussion, see The Elusive Absolute Surface Air Temperature.

References
Please see the GISTEMP references page for citations to publications related to this research.
Copies of many of our papers are available in the GISS publications database. Re-prints not available there may be obtained by request from Dr. James Hansen.
Contacts
Please address scientific inquiries about the GISTEMP analysis to Dr. James Hansen.
Please address technical questions about these GISTEMP webpages to Dr. Reto Ruedy.
Also participating in the GISTEMP analysis are Dr. Makiko Sato and Dr. Ken Lo.

+ NASA Privacy Policy and Important Notices

GISS Website Curator: Robert B. Schmunk
Responsible NASA Official: James E. Hansen
Page updated: 2007-08-07

Is This The First of NASA's Errors? What Else Are They Covering Up?

This current expose of how NASA handles historic temperature data, which is integral to modeling the climate and making predictions about global warming, demonstrates how easy it is to manipulate data. (See the following article.)

Are they going to have to do all of their climate calculations over, one more time. Will the United Nations' IPCC do the same? Should we be skeptical about the outcome? I say yes, very skeptical, and suspicious. Should NASA get away with this "slight of hand" trickery? There is politics here folks, going on at the highest levels of government and the media. We've been wondering when the global warming facade will begin to crumble. I think this is just the beginning.
Peter

From:
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200708/CUL20070816b.html


NASA's Backtrack on Warmest Year Is Being Ignored, Critic Says
By Randy Hall CNSNews.com Staff Writer/Editor August 16, 2007(CNSNews.com) -

NASA scientists this month corrected an error that resulted in 1934 replacing 1998 as the warmest year on record in the U.S., thus challenging some key global warming arguments, but the correction is being ignored, a conservative climate expert charged Wednesday. Yet at the same time, announcements that support global warming are considered "front-page news," said H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).


For his part, James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has called the correction is "statistically insignificant." Burnett challenged that assertion, saying the correction made it clear that NASA's conclusion -- that the majority of the 10 hottest years have occurred since 1990 -- is false. "Time after time, Hansen and other global warming alarmists present their data as 'the facts,' and [say that] 'you can't argue with data,' " he said. "Well, it turns out their data is just wrong. And when it's wrong, they want to say it's not important.

"The controversy began on Aug. 4, when blogger Steve McIntyre of the ClimateAudit.org website, sent an email to NASA asserting that the data collected by the agency after 1999 was not being adjusted to allow for the times of day when readings were taken or the locations of the monitoring stations. According to a blog posting by NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt, agency analysts then "looked into it and found that this coincided with the switch between two sources of U.S. temperature data." "There had been a faulty assumption that these two sources matched," Schmidt said. "The obvious fix was to make an adjustment based on a period of overlap so that these offsets disappear. "Schmidt said the data analysis was then adjusted accordingly, and a note of thanks emailed to McIntyre."The net effect of the change was to reduce mean U.S. anomalies by about 0.15 degrees Celsius for the years 2000-2006," which resulted in a "very minor knock" on information from earlier years, Schmidt added.

Burnett, however, called the miscalculation "a serious math error" and noted that according to NASA's newly published data:
The hottest year on record is 1934, not 1998;
The third hottest year on record was 1921, not 2006;
Three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940; and
Six of the top 10 hottest years occurred prior to 90 percent of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions during the last century.

'Ignore the man behind the curtain'
The NCPA analyst also charged that because the change does not fit the mainstream media's view of global warming as an immediate and ongoing crisis, the incident was being ignored by television news networks and newspapers across the country. Cybercast News Service conducted a Nexis search for news articles over the past month containing the words "NASA," "1998" and "1934." As of Tuesday, Aug. 14, only eight newspapers had discussed the correction, along with United Press International (UPI) and the Fox News Channel.On Wednesday, however, a dozen major news outlets -- ranging from the Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune to the Los Angeles Times and CNN -- finally ran stories on the change, most emphasizing the resulting controversy that had erupted across the conservative blogosphere.

In the Washington Post, Hansen said that the critics were "making a mountain of a molehill. The change does nothing to our understanding of how the global climate is changing and is being used by critics to muddy the debate." "Hansen said that NASA generally does not release or discuss national weather statistics because it is more concerned with global patterns," the Post reported. "The agency that pays more attention to American temperature trends is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has said that most of the warmest years in the past century have been in the past 12 years."

"Hansen said the revised data do nothing to change that overall trend," the newspaper added. Burnett was highly critical of the Washington Post's coverage of the story. "The Post gave James Hansen -- the one who made the error -- four paragraphs to tell you why it's not important and why it should be ignored," he stated. "Hansen basically said, 'I screwed up, but just ignore the man behind the curtain,' and they let him get away with it.

"Burnett also dismissed the idea that the change is "statistically insignificant" because the numbers concerned were so small. "A few years back, an error in satellite data was found and corrected from 0.04 degrees of cooling per decade to 0.01 degrees, and that was front-page news," he said. "If a change of 0.03 degrees is significant, then what about this, which is five times more? If the one is important for making your case, then the other is important for undermining your case.

"What's really important is not that it shows whether it's warming or not -- because it doesn't," Burnett stated. "But we've supposedly got the best data in the world, and we're relying on data from a lot of places where they're not checking it nearly as closely as our guys. "As for NASA, Burnett charged that "they need mathematicians on their staff, not climatologists. What does it say when we had to have a blogger go in there and discover their error?"

NASA Changes Historic Climate Data

The fact that NASA recently changed it's Historical Climate Data is not trivial. It is going to have far reaching impact. This will begin with the questioning of the UN's findings on global warming and climate change as reported by the IPCC. It will affect everything relating to global warming. Read the following please.
Peter

from: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/08/13/how-important-nasa-s-change-historical-climate-data-last-week

How Important Was NASA’s Change to Historical Climate Data Last Week?
By Noel Sheppard August 13, 2007 - 10:43 ET
Last week's revelation by Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre of a serious mistake and subsequent changes made by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in the temperature history of America has created quite a debate in the new media.

While conservative bloggers were quick to point out the hypocrisy regarding the lack of an official announcement from GISS chief James Hansen as well as the possible significance to the entire global warming debate, alarmists such as RealClimate and TNR's The Plank viewed McIntyre's discovery and GISS's alterations less than earth shattering.
With that in mind, McIntyre published a response at Anthony Watts' "Watts Up With That?" Saturday (Climate Audit is undergoing a server change) with his take on the issue (emphasis added throughout):
The Hansen error is far from trivial at the level of individual [weather] stations. Grand Canyon was one of the stations previously discussed at climateaudit.org in connection with Tucson urban heat island. In this case, the Hansen error was about 0.5 deg C. Some discrepancies are 1 deg C or higher.

[A]s you can see from the distribution, the impact on the majority of stations is substantially higher than 0.15 deg. For users of information regarding individual stations, the changes may be highly relevant.

GISS recognized that the error had a significant impact on individual stations and took rapid steps to revise their station data (and indeed the form of their revision seems far from ideal indicating the haste of their revision.) GISS failed to provide any explicit notice or warning on their station data webpage that the data had been changed, or an explicit notice to users who had downloaded data or graphs in the past that there had been significant changes to many U.S. series. This obligation existed regardless of any impact on world totals.

Readers should certainly be aware that this was what I specifically took issue with - the lack of disclosure that this had occurred:
GISS has emphasized recently that the U.S. constitutes only 2% of global land surface, arguing that the impact of the error is negligible on the global averagel [sic]. While this may be so for users of the GISS global average, U.S. HCN stations constitute about 50% of active (with values in 2004 or later) stations in the GISS network (as shown below). The sharp downward step in station counts after March 2006 in the right panel shows the last month in which USHCN data is presently included in the GISS system. The Hansen error affects all the USHCN stations and, to the extent that users of the GISS system are interested in individual stations, the number of affected stations is far from insignificant, regardless of the impact on global averages.

McIntyre then pointed out the hypocrisy in the lack of official reporting of these changes:
In my opinion, it would have been more appropriate for Gavin Schmidt of GISS (who was copied on the GISS correspondence to me) to ensure that a statement like this was on the caption to the U.S. temperature history on the GISS webpage, rather than after the fact at realclimate.
Obviously much of the blogosphere delight in the leader board changes is a reaction to many fevered press releases and news stories about year x being the "warmest year". For example, on Jan 7, 2007, NOAA announced that The 2006 average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was the warmest on record.

This press release was widely covered as you can determine by googling "warmest year 2006 united states". Now NOAA and NASA are different organizations and NOAA, not NASA, made the above press release, but members of the public can surely be forgiven for not making fine distinctions between different alphabet soups. I think that NASA might reasonably have foreseen that the change in rankings would catch the interest of the public and, had they made a proper report on their webpage, they might have forestalled much subsequent criticism.

In addition, while Schmidt describes the changes atop the leader board as "very minor re-arrangements", many followers of the climate debate are aware of intense battles over 0.1 or 0.2 degree (consider the satellite battles.) Readers might perform a little thought experiment: suppose that Spencer and Christy had published a temperature history in which they claimed that 1934 was the warmest U.S. year on record and then it turned out that they had been a computer programming error opposite to the one that Hansen made, that Wentz and Mears discovered there was an error of 0.15 deg C in the Spencer and Christy results and, after fiixing this error, it turned out that 2006 was the warmest year on record. Would realclimate simply describe this as a "very minor re-arrangement"?

Not a chance. In fact, this would have been announced with great enthusiasm, and likely would have been the lead report on all of the evening news programs, as well as making front page headlines the following day:
So while the Hansen error did not have a material impact on world temperatures, it did have a very substantial impact on U.S. station data and a "significant" impact on the U.S. average. Both of these surely "matter" and both deserved formal notice from Hansen and GISS.

Yet, something that has been lost in the fight over this issue is that as a result of identifying this Y2K error by Hansen et al, McIntyre has grown more concerned about the veracity of other data being collated and disseminated by GISS, as well as the lack of transparency concerning adjustments to raw data to compensate for the heat island effect:

In the course of reviewing quality problems at various surface sites, among other things, I compared these different versions of station data, including a comparison of the Tucson weather station shown above to the Grand Canyon weather station, which is presumably less affected by urban problems. This comparison demonstrated a very odd pattern discussed here. The adjustments show that the trend in the problematic Tucson site was reduced in the course of the adjustments, but they also showed that the Grand Canyon data was also adjusted, so that, instead of the 1930s being warmer than the present as in the raw data, the 2000s were warmer than the 1930s, with a sharp increase in the 2000s.

Now some portion of the post-2000 jump in adjusted Grand Canyon values shown here is due to Hansen's Y2K error, but it only accounts for a 0.5 deg C jump after 2000 and does not explain why Grand Canyon values should have been adjusted so much. In this case, the adjustments are primarily at the USHCN stage. The USHCN station history adjustments appear particularly troublesome to me, not just here but at other sites (e.g. Orland CA). They end up making material changes to sites identified as "good" sites and my impression is that the USHCN adjustment procedures may be adjusting some of the very "best" sites (in terms of appearance and reported history) to better fit histories from sites that are clearly non-compliant with WMO standards (e.g. Marysville, Tucson). There are some real and interesting statistical issues with the USHCN station history adjustment procedure and it is ridiculous that the source code for these adjustments (and the subsequent GISS adjustments - see bottom panel) is not available/ [sic]

Adding it up, and data from seemingly good weather stations is being adjusted up for reasons that McIntyre can't explain, and Hansen and company refuse to provide the procedure and the source code such that folks like McIntyre - and policymakers - can review the methodology.
Why is all this a big secret, and why should any American citizen or politician just blindly accept data from an agency that refuses to make transparent what the station history adjustment procedure is?

If one views the above assessment as a type of limited software audit (limited by lack of access to source code and operating manuals), one can say firmly that the GISS software had not only failed to pick up and correct fictitious steps of up to 1 deg C, but that GISS actually introduced this error in the course of their programming.

According to any reasonable audit standards, one would conclude that the GISS software had failed this particular test. While GISS can (and has) patched the particular error that I reported to them, their patching hardly proves the merit of the GISS (and USHCN) adjustment procedures. These need to be carefully examined. This was a crying need prior to the identification of the Hansen error and would have been a crying need even without the Hansen error.

One practical effect of the error is that it surely becomes much harder for GISS to continue the obstruction of detailed examination of their source code and methodologies after the embarrassment of this particular incident. GISS itself has no policy against placing source code online and, indeed, a huge amount of code for their climate model is online. So it's hard to understand their present stubbornness.

Finally, McIntyre addressed how the Y2K changes might impact global data (ROW):
In the U.S., despite the criticisms being rendered at surfacestations.org, there are many rural stations that have been in existence over a relatively long period of time; while one may cavil at how NOAA and/or GISS have carried out adjustments, they have collected metadata for many stations and made a concerted effort to adjust for such metadata.

On the other hand, many of the stations in China, Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere are in urban areas (such as Shanghai or Beijing). In some of the major indexes (CRU,NOAA), there appears to be no attempt whatever to adjust for urbanization. GISS does report an effort to adjust for urbanization in some cases, but their ability to do so depends on the existence of nearby rural stations, which are not always available. Thus, ithere [sic] is a real concern that the need for urban adjustment is most severe in the very areas where adjustments are either not made or not accurately made.

In its consideration of possible urbanization and/or microsite effects, IPCC has taken the position that urban effects are negligible, relying on a very few studies (Jones et al 1990, Peterson et al 2003, Parker 2005, 2006), each of which has been discussed at length at this site. In my opinion, none of these studies can be relied on for concluding that urbanization impacts have been avoided in the ROW sites contributing to the overall history.

Moreover, Keenan's report last week cast grave doubt about the veracity of Jones et al's 1990 paper on urban effects being negligible.
In sum, though this Y2K error and subsequent changes to America's climate history is not necessarily a smoking gun, the lack of reporting, and consistent refusal on the part of Hansen and Schmidt to share methodologies and source codes surrounding statistical formulae remains a grave concern, as does how much all this impacts the global numbers.

Of course, I'm sure when Hansen and Schmidt get around to seeing how this does indeed relate to world temperatures, they'll be quick in alerting the media.
Alas, unless the changes to global data are deemed miniscule, that could be irrelevant, for with the exception of Fox News, it appears that not one major American press organization felt the revelation of GISS's Y2K error, and how it related to U.S. climate history, was at all newsworthy.
Imagine that.
—Noel Sheppard is an economist, business owner, and Associate Editor of NewsBusters