A balmy 32* here this morning. High to be 50*. On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 7:09 AM, mark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > 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. > > A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the > Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and > that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control > over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: > the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the > four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change > (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are > the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher > temperatures than the others. > > Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's > methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr > Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface > temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was > not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s. > > Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the > IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by > claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much > faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in > the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they > have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped. > > Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in > climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on > the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to > embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to > remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which > should give us all pause for thought. > > > http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml > > > -- *~@):~{> --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
