A look at the systematic and dishonest fiddling that has been done with climate data to make us think that there is a global warming problem, followed by a reminder that none of this is new:
Bear in mind that warming and cooling concerns are nothing new, as this alarming bulletin reminds us –The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.A RealClimate blogger? No, that was the US Weather Bureau in 1922. We saw a global cooling scare in 1924, a global warming scare in 1933, another global cooling in the early 1970s, and another warming scare today. The changes the USHCN promised Watts won’t help resolve anything for another decade or so, but perhaps future generations will be able to reduce the alarming increase in the number of climate alarms.
Maybe global warming is a real problem — but having dishonest scientists lie about it isn’t going to convince people of it.
Well, if dishonest scientists are out there about the weather, why should they be right about evolution?
Did you even bother to read the article? It points out that a single scientist is in charge of the revisionist NASA temperature data — one with political reasons to have an agenda — and can manipulate it with only the most specious of excuses. Evolutionary theory includes data from thousands of different scientists, most of whom are primarily interested in finding the truth (that’s the purpose behind scientific disciplines, after all).
I could easily believe that a small group of scientists could be intellectually dishonest — the Discovery Institute is a prime example — but most people are mostly honest, and scientists even more so than the general populace, by both training and inclination.
Sorry, that argument doesn’t wash.
Global warming also includes data from thousands of different scientists. Yes, NASA is one group that has been keeping track of the situation. But there are numerous other groups and individuals, both public and private, that have obtained their own data that corroborates the fact that the world, in general, is getting warmer.
I agree, most people are mostly honest, and scientists even more so than the general populace. So when a very large majority of scientists say that global warming is happening, and will be the cause of much suffering in the future if we don’t change, I’m apt to listen to them.
NASA is one of only four groups that track global temperature data, according to the article. And its data is the only one of those four sets that shows a warming trend over the past ten years. The other three are actually showing a temperature decline over that period.
As I said, maybe global warming is really happening and maybe it isn’t. I don’t have enough information to judge that at present. But having “Al Gore’s science advisor and the world’s leading long-term advocate of global warming” in charge of one of those four sets of data, and apparently tweaking it to reflect his opinion, is not good science.
The article is very misleading, and there are a lot of things that are implicated without being fully stated, and without any proof (or even references).
The biggest issue I have with the article is that it states that there are only four groups that track global temperature data, which I highly, highly doubt. It begins with the very generalized statement that “Two authorities provide us with analysis of long-term surface temperature trends”, but doesn’t give any references by which we can verify that information.
As for the satellite data, it turns out that the author of the article conveniently forgot to mention that their data was incorrect. The UAH data had to be corrected because their satellites had started to drift and had begun taking readings during the evenings instead of the daytime, thus resulting in a false cooling trend. Once the data was recalculated to take into account the drift, a definite warming trend was found.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Satellite-Measurements-Confirm-Global-Warming-6284.shtml
http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=312
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;281/5385/1948
Another thing about the article that really irks me is how the author throws names around to try and show an implied bias. The article talks about James Hansen as “Al Gore’s science advisor” implying that he has some sort of political bias. Yet James Hansen has been the director of G.I.S.S. since 1981 (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/files/cv/cv_hansen_200702.pdf), long before Al Gore had even begun talking about climate change. The fact that Al Gore went to him for advice is obvious. Wouldn’t you go the director of your country’s leading authority on tracking climate changes? For the author to then take Al Gore’s choice of reference and impose a backwards implication of political bias onto Hansen only highlights how much of a bias the article’s author had when writing this.
Furthermore, the fact that Hansen is “the world’s leading long-term advocate of global warming” doesn’t not mean he has a bias, or is being unscrupulous. Perhaps he is the world’s leading advocate because he’s seen evidence to support his conclusions. I’m sure Newton was the world’s leading advocate of gravity, and Galileo was the world’s leading advocate of a solar-centric reality. The author throws that term in there to have us think he must be skewing the data to fit his beliefs, when it could just as easily be that the data he’s seeing is the foundation of his beliefs.
Finally, even if there is data that’s being skewed (instead of refactored based on previous error), there’s no proof that he’s the one doing the skewing. Once again, the article is satisfied with cheap implications instead of finding and giving proof that he’s the one behind it. If unbeknownst to us, someone was skewing the data, and then handed us the results shown in the NASA graph, we too would believe there’s a big trend.
It makes perfect sense to me that only four groups would keep such data — it’s very expensive and technically difficult to launch a group of satellites, or to keep a large number of people taking temperature readings on the surface.
As for the UAH satellite data being corrected — that correction was done three years ago, and it now pretty well matches the data from the other set of satellites, and from the other ground-based data set. The only set of data that all three disagree with is the NASA data, They all apparently pretty much agreed until NASA started revising their data, which strongly suggests that the revision is wrong.
You’re right, maybe Hanson himself isn’t behind the revisions, and is only reacting to what he’s seeing in the data. But someone at NASA is irrefutably playing with the numbers, and as he’s the head of that department, it’s unlikely that it’s being done without his knowledge.
From what I’ve been able to discover, it looks like there was a global warming trend for a while, but over the last ten years, the planet has actually been cooling slightly. From Canadian climatologist Timothy Ball (“Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts?”, Feb 2007):
While there’s still room for honest disagreement, the evidence suggests that an impending global warming crisis may be nothing but a political boogey man.
(Oh, and your third reference link is to a subscription-only site, so I couldn’t see it.)
Maybe the Canadian climatologist you cited has an agenda in favor of global warming. L-rd knows Canada could use it. 😉