AGW Scandal: A Case Study In Aberrations Of Group Psychology

[_bcspace]

When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.

When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous “hockey stick” graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years. Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html

[_Res Ipsa]

Oh my goodness. Blogger with a degree in electrical engineering who posts under a fake name discovers massive fraud in the U.S. temperature record. Where is my fainting couch?

Funny that this "fraud" is fully disclosed on the relevant web pages that outline how how the data is adjusted for well-known biases in the record. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-re ... toring.php In particular, U.S. weather stations changed at some point from reporting the daily temperature for the record from the afternoon, when it is hotter, to the morning, when it is cooler. That introduced a step-change cooling bias into the record.

by the way, the page I linked to shows the global land sea temperature record using both raw and unadjusted data. Can you spot any significant difference? No, me neither.

Goddard's last big splash consisted of accusations related to sea ice. He had to retract those almost immediately. http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2008/0 ... ?mobile=nc

[_Kevin Graham]

A blogger living in England no less... the Right Wing blogosphere is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for their "news" these days.

[_Gunnar]

A blogger living in England no less... the Right Wing blogosphere is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for their "news" these days.

Yet again, bcspace embarrasses himself by quoting an anti-AGW source that is easily and devastatingly refuted--in this case, a blogger who holds the world's record for the most quickly retracted false claim about AGW (as Brad Hudson pointed out). Will he never learn? It is blazingly obvious that many AGW deniers are deliberately trying to take strategic advantage of the fact that outrageous false claims almost invariably get far more publicity and media exposure than their subsequent retraction, and that the more outrageous the claim, the more true this is.

[_Brackite]

May 2014 was Earth's warmest May on record

Last month was the warmest May for the Earth on record, according to a climate report released Monday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The heat was fueled by unusual warmth in the oceans, which make up more than 70% of the Earth's surface.

"The majority of the world experienced warmer-than-average monthly temperatures, with record warmth across eastern Kazakhstan, parts of Indonesia and central and northwestern Australia," the report from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center noted. "Scattered sections across every major ocean basin were also record warm."

The combined average temperature over the entire globe in May 2014 was 59.93 degrees Fahrenheit, which was 1.33 degrees above the 20th-century average, NOAA said.

The USA was warm in May, but far from a record. A report last week noted that May 2014 was the nation's 32nd warmest May on record.

Global temperature records go back to 1880.

[_canpakes]

May 2014 was Earth's warmest May on record

... Global temperature records go back to 1880.

bc will be by any minute to tell us how this isn't true, but is instead a massive pro-warming conspiracy cobbled together by meteorologists and thermometer manufacturers.

[_Brackite]

bc will be by any minute to tell us how this isn't true, but is instead a massive pro-warming conspiracy cobbled together by meteorologists and thermometer manufacturers.

Or he will probably not bother responding in this thread.

[_Gunnar]

bc will be by any minute to tell us how this isn't true, but is instead a massive pro-warming conspiracy cobbled together by meteorologists and thermometer manufacturers.

Or he will probably not bother responding in this thread.

Hopefully that is because even he now realizes how badly he has embarrassed himself that OP.

[_Quasimodo]

Hopefully that is because even he now realizes how badly he has embarrassed himself that OP.

I admire your optimism, Gunnar, but I don't think BC ever experiences embarrassment. If he responds at all it will just be to claim some dubious victory and retreat.

[_Some Schmo]

Hopefully that is because even he now realizes how badly he has embarrassed himself that OP.

I admire your optimism, Gunnar, but I don't think BC ever experiences embarrassment. If he responds at all it will just be to claim some dubious victory and retreat.

Yeah, he would need to be self-reflective in order to be embarrassed, so I don't see it happening (assuming the cadet is honest about what he writes here, and I have a hard time believing that, so who knows? If he's just messing with us, he needn't be embarrassed because his nonsense likely gives him what he's looking for, reaction-wise).