Cooking the Books at NASA

Global warming aka Climate change has become a mantra to those who persist in seeing humans as the bane of the environment and the universe.  Time and again it has been proven that climate change is NOT a human driven event and that instead of warming, the earth is actually cooling.  Yet true believers are always looking for more facts to bolster their failing arguments and, in some cases, actually cooking them up.

The following exposes such a story:

Amateur team finds NASA error similar to one they discovered a year ago.

NASA’S Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is one of the world’s primary sources for climate data. GISS issues regular updates on world temperatures based on their analysis of temperature readings from thousands of monitoring stations over the globe.

GISS’ most recent data release originally reported last October as being extraordinarily warm– a full 0.78C above normal. This would have made it the warmest October on record; a huge increase over the previous month’s data.

Those results set off alarm bells with Steve McIntyre and his gang of Baker Street irregulars at Climateaudit.org. They noted that NASA’s data didn’t agree at all with the satellite temperature record, which showed October to be very mild, continuing the same trend of slight cooling that has persisted since 1998. So they dug a little deeper.

McKintyre, the same man who found errors last year in GISS’s US temperature record, quickly noted that most of the temperature increase was coming from Russia. A chart of world temperatures showed that in October, most of Russia, the largest nation on Earth, was not only registering hot, but literally off the scale. Yet anecdotal reports were suggesting that October was actually slightly colder than normal. Could there be another error in GISS’s data?

An alert reader on McKintyre’s blog revealed that there was a very large problem. Looking at the actual readings from individual stations in Russia showed a curious anomaly. The locations had all been assigned the exact temperatures from a month earlier– the much warmer month of September. Russia cools very rapidly in the fall months, so recycling the data from the earlier month had led to a massive temperature increase.

A few locations in Ireland were also found to be using September data.

Now here is where it gets really interesting…

GISS is run by Dr. James Hansen, a strident global warming advocate who has accused oil companies of “crimes against humanity”.  Hansen recently made headlines when he travelled to London to testify on behalf of a group of environmentalists who had damaged a coal plant in protest against global warming. Hansen also serves as science advisor to Al Gore.

Steve McKintyre informed GISS of the error by email. According to McKintyre, there was no response, but within “about an hour”, GISS pulled down the erroneous data, citing a “mishap” and pointing the finger of blame upstream to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration (NOAA).

NOAA’s Deputy Director of Communications, Scott Smullens, tells DailyTech that NOAA is responsible only for temperature readings in the US, not those in other nations.

Read the whole thing at Daily Tech and then read ClimateChange.org‘s deliciously snarky story:

Did Napoleon Use Hansen’s Temperature Data?