Another Dagger in the Heart of Global Warming Advocacy

Last week NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) announced that this past October was the hottest October on record. Now it has been discovered that they were wrong. It turned out to be yet another glaring data error.

When GISS made the announcement last week it was shocking. All over the world were reports of unseasonal cold temperatures and record snowfalls. Even the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month of October.

What caused this major blunder? According to the UK’s Telegraph, a detailed analysis of the GISS data found that 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.

When the errors were discovered by meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the GISS began to revise their figures. To compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, and not wanting to admit that they were wrong, the GISS claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic. The only problem was that satellite images of the Arctic were telling quite a different story.

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.

Finally a GISS spokesperson tried to explain the error by claiming that the GISS does not have the resources to “exercise proper quality control over the data they receive.” The figures published by the GISS are “one of four data sets that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rely on to promote the case for global warming . . .”

GISS is run by Al Gore’s “chief scientific ally, Dr. James Hanson”. The Telegraph accused Dr. Hansen and GISS of making extreme claims and creating several global warming scares over the years.

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.

As more and more scientists reject the “fact” of global warming, it becomes obvious that something needs to be done to insure accurate data. Science based upon advocacy isn’t really science.

Here’s a quote from Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey:

The admission from GISS that they can’t verify their source data when reaching to conclusions should embarrass scientists throughout the profession, as verification of data is absolutely necessary before reaching any conclusions. Without that, GISS may as well be studying the entrails of goats to make predictions about the future climate.

For more details on how this error was discovered see Anthony Watts’ blog Watts Up With That and Steve McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit.