Washington, DC 1/18/2011 1:49:38 AM
News / Science & Technology

US Agencies Still Fiddling Temperature Record, Reports SPPI

NASA and NOAA, which each receive close to half a billion dollars a year in taxpayer funding, have been systematically fiddling the worldwide temperature record for years, making “global warming” look worse than it is, according to a new paper by the Science and Public Policy Institute.  The findings are reported by Joe D’Aleo, a leading meteorologist.

Robert Ferguson, President of SPPI, said: “Despite billions spent on official claims about the supposed threat of catastrophic man-made ‘global warming’, opinion polls show the public are no longer fooled. A  main reason why the voters buy don’t climate alarmism any more is that the tiny but well-connected, lavishly-funded Climategate clique keeps on being caught out bending the scientific evidence.

The problem of data integrity has recently been commented on by MIT’s Dr. Richard Lindzen, “Inevitably in climate science, when data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data...That the data should always need correcting to agree with models is totally implausible and indicative of a certain corruption within the climate science community.” Mr. D’Aleo’s paper is a damning exposé of the inner workings of two agencies of the US Government –

  •  The global temperature data from surface stations is “seriously compromised: the data suffer significant contamination by urbanization and other local factors such as changes in land cover and land use”. Numerous peer review papers suggest contamination of 30%, 50% or more.
  • The state of the temperature database, in the words of one of its operators, is “hopeless”, with “hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy  and duplicate stations”.
  • The NASA warming is achieved in part by inventing data in arctic areas where no stations exist.
  • In the US, the warmest decade of the 20th century was the 1930s, and the warmest year was 1934, NASA’s chief climate scientist announced after the last super El Nino.
  • NOAA tampered with temperature data in 2000, 2007 and 2009 to create an artificial increase of 0.3 F° in the warming trend since the 1930s.
  • NASA admits even today on their website, there is no generally-accepted standard for surface air temperatures.
  • Temperatures for the 1930s to 1950s have been readjusted downward to make the warming since then seem greater than it is.
  • Temperatures for recent decades have been readjusted upward to make the warming of the 20th century seem greater than it is.
  • Over time in the NASA database, the warming trend has been steadily increasing – not because the weather is getting warmer but because NASA keeps tampering with the data.
  • The data tampering became more serious and more frequent in 2007, when a strong la Niña caused widespread and profound global cooling.
  • Adjustments by NOAA and NASA, rather than real-world temperature changes, account for virtually all the apparent warming trend in the  global data.
  • NASA and NOAA have repeatedly resisted Freedom of Information Act requests for release of the unadjusted data and documentation of adjustments made, probably because they fear independent analysis will demonstrate the adjustments are unwarranted and warming insignificant
  • Global temperature databases are “seriously flawed” and “can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or rankings or validate model forecasts”.

In a lengthy paper updated in August 2010, Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? , Watts and D’Aleo catalogued numerous case studies of temperature data tampering around the world.  This issue is of critical importance  because these very data sets are used as justification of advocacy for formulating and implementing unprecedented policy decisions seeking  radical transformations of our society and institutions.

Said Ferguson, “So blatantly obvious has the tampering become that Congress must mandate a thorough  investigation of the temperature records, independent of the government scientists controlling them.  A ‘B’ team of non-government and non-UN experts must be established with access to all the raw data, records, adjustments, fudges, bodges  and computer codes currently being black-boxed by government scientists.”

The full paper can be found at http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/noaa_2010_report.pdf

Contact - Robert Ferguson

www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org

bferguson@sppinstitute.org

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Tel.  202-288-5699