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Unsettling SNAFU

In the settled science, as NASA global warming enthusiast’s books appear to be inadvertantly cooked … again. Take it away, UK Telegraph. The World Has Never Seen Such Freezing Heat:

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.

… 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.

…

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

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.

Strap yourself in for more inadvertant hilarity, with Al Gore in the running for Warmth Czar in the Obama administration. But when they mass their forces to invade businesses and wallets around the world to counter a threat that is based on faulty intelligence, is it going to be because Hansen/Gore/Obama Lied, that the coal industry died?

Blair notes that Hansen’s efforts to build a coalition of the willing are faltering. Lefty Oz PM Rudd declines to shut down mining ops.

A cruelly cynical Tigerhawk wonders whether anyone will care to closely examine the faulty intelligence.

Hold everything … Soccer Dad reports Gore is insisting he doesn’t want the Czarship! Must come with responsibility, the threat of closer scrutiny or something like that. Much better, as the Obamists are already learning, to slam, slur and come up with bright ideas from a safe distance.

Watts Up gets wonky with the science, wonders whether the warming scientists are measuring their own hot air. Well, as NeptLex puts it, garbage in, garbage out.

Topics: warmalism

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:36 am on Sunday, November 16, 2008

4 Responses to “Unsettling SNAFU”

1. Fatty Bolger Says:
   November 16th, 2008 at 12:22 pm

   James Hansen is a fraud, and has been for a very long time. I think we may be witnessing the beginning of a real schism between honest scientists who study global climate, and the shrill fearmongers like Hansen.

   Up to this point, it has been the sqeaky wheels like Hansen and Mann who have been getting huge amounts of publicity based on dubious claims, while the wider scientific community mostly ignored it, probably because they agreed with the basic results, if not the methodology. However, as it becomes inescapably obvious that people like Hansen are deliberately fudging data to get the results they want, though, we’ll start to see increasing scrutiny and criticism from other scientists in the field.

2. RebeccaH Says:
   November 16th, 2008 at 1:26 pm

   This is whole AGW crisis thing was nothing but a naked grab for power and big bucks from the beginning, and the gullible bought it. As they always do.

3. eduardo Says:
   November 17th, 2008 at 1:20 pm

   NBC now using Sunday Night football as a propaganda platform. Last night, Meredith Viera assurred us that, with all polar melting, the water levels would soon increase 200 feet (unless humanity reverted to pre-industrial, hunter-gatherer cultures). How does GE justify this behavior?

4. J.M. Heinrichs Says:
   November 17th, 2008 at 4:57 pm

   eduardo
   GE is a “Green Company”: http://www.grist.org/news/muck/2005/05/10/little-ge/

   Cheers

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