Haven’t had one of these for a while – but as more and more evidence starts to come in that anthropogenic global warming is the biggest hoax in human history, we’ll start having a lot of them. Meanwhile, this particular story is of either exceptional boneheadedness or, alternately, a bit of global warming alarmist book-cooking which was caught:
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs – run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious “hockey stick” graph – GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic – in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.
Their biggest fear – that a year will come soon which shows a drop in average global temperatures. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that we’ve already had such, but the data has been so obscured by the global warming zealots that it hasn’t gotten out. Right now, the key for the alarmists is to keep the alarm up long enough for Executive and legislative steps to be taken under President Obama – they have to get global warming encoded in US law and regulation quickly, before the facts all come out. Once the laws and regulations are in, it will be exceptionally hard to get them out, even if we have 10 years of declining temperatures right after we’ve implemented the alarmist’s agenda.
I wonder, though, if we could work up a class action lawsuit against Al Gore and the entire environmentalist movement? Fraud must have a penalty, ya know?
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