Friday, January 15, 2010

More Data Manipulation from Global Warming "scientists." NASA guilty of fudging data

Now that the IPCC's data from CRU has been debunked thanks to the leaked emails, attention has finally come to gross data manipulation at NASA. I was disappointed with the documentary KUSI-TV produced but D'Aleo's report is excellent and brief: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NOAAroleinclimategate.pdf.

PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Thursday, January 14, 2010
Source: KUSI-TV

Climate researchers have discovered that NASA researchers improperly manipulated data in order to claim 2005 as “THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.” KUSI-TV meteorologist, Weather Channel founder, and iconic weatherman John Coleman will present these findings in a one-hour special airing on KUSI-TV on Jan.14 at 9 p.m. A related report will be made available on the Internet at 6 p.m. EST on January 14th at www.kusi.com.

In a new report, computer expert E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo discovered extensive manipulation of the temperature data by the U.S. Government’s two primary climate centers: the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Ashville, North Carolina and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City. Smith and D’Aleo accuse these centers of manipulating temperature data to give the appearance of warmer temperatures than actually occurred by trimming the number and location of weather observation stations. The report is available online at http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NOAAroleinclimategate.pdf.

The report reveals that there were no actual temperatures left in the computer database when NASA/NCDC proclaimed 2005 as “THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.” The NCDC deleted actual temperatures at thousands of locations throughout the world as it changed to a system of global grid points, each of which is determined by averaging the temperatures of two or more adjacent weather observation stations. So the NCDC grid map contains only averaged, not real temperatures, giving rise to significant doubt that the result is a valid representation of Earth temperatures.

The number of actual weather observation points used as a starting point for world average temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,000 now. “That leaves much of the world unaccounted for,” says D’Aleo.

The NCDC data are regularly used by the National Weather Service to declare a given month or year as setting a record for warmth. Such pronouncements are typically made in support of the global warming alarmism agenda. Researchers who support the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also regularly use the NASA/NCDC data, including researchers associated with the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that is now at the center of the “Climategate” controversy.

This problem is only the tip of the iceberg with NCDC data. “For one thing, it is clear that comparing data from previous years, when the final figure was produced by averaging a large number of temperatures, with those of later years, produced from a small temperature base and the grid method, is like comparing apples and oranges,” says Smith. “When the differences between the warmest year in history and the tenth warmest year is less than three quarters of a degree, it becomes silly to rely on such comparisons,” added D’Aleo who asserts that the data manipulation is “scientific travesty” that was committed by activist scientists to advance the global warming agenda.

Smith and D’Aleo are both interviewed as part of a report on this study on the television special, “Global Warming: The Other Side” seen at 9 PM on January 14th on KUSI-TV, channel 9/51, San Diego, California. That program can now be viewed via computer at the website http://www.kusi.com/. The detailed report is available at http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NOAAroleinclimategate.pdf.


9 comments:

Kevin Aschim said...

I also watched that documentary last night and was also disappointed with the production quality. But when I learned about the blatant corruption of data and the unbelievable deletion of raw data, I literally felt the blood rush out of my face.

This was nothing short of scientific vandalism. It is like burning or defacing rare papyrus scrolls. It is like a CFO misrepresenting revenues to pump up share prices to collect fraudulently on bonuses. It is nothing short of shocking and would result in enormous fines and jail for most professionals in other lines of work.

But what is not shocking is the utter silence from the mainstream media over this outrage. Their silence, to me, confirms tacit compliance.

Their silence reminds me of guilty schoolboys too afraid to speak up and "tattletale" on their renegade colleagues.

I see a Green Technology Bubble forming and getting ready to burst as political events in the US are now aligning to reverse Obama decrees re the EPA and growing Senate resistance even among democrats to pass Cap and Trade.

I expect that the London Telegraph will profile this shortly. James Delingpole and others at the Telegraph have been doing a good job reporting on the UAE CRU and IPCC and Rajendra Pachauri scandals. What is interesting is to read reader comments on these Telegraph stories and the almost universal support of British readers who are fed up paying carbon credits to Brussels, carbon credit VAT to the mafia, subsidies to Danish and German owned wind turbines (which all stopped turning during the becalmed Arctic High that descended over Britain) and for enduring the shutdown of British steel mills which are moving to India solely to collect carbon credits (and which are also owned in part by Rajendra Pachauri - Head of the IPCC). The British have done nothing but pay more for their energy while losing more industry and gaining exactly no green jobs in the interim. All while their new German built wind turbines are becalmed during the coldest winter in 100 years.

rainswept said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Kevin Aschim said...

There must be terms in the mundane funding contracts behind these projects that refer to ethics and financial accountability.

If these contracts are publicly available or if they can be made available to commercial crime officials via a search warrant, I would love to have a team of lawyers reviewing thee contracts in the public interest of US taxpayers.

Seems shareholders have more rights these days than taxpayers.

Lesson is that your shareholder vote has more value than an electoral taxpayer vote. No wonder voter turnout is dropping.

enthemic said...

This paper describes the original work relating to changes in producing the GHCN data set:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/Peterson-Vose-1997.pdf

enthemic said...

And this web site will let you compare temperature data from the HADCRUT3 & GISTEMP data (weather station data) to the RSS & UAH (saltelite data) - as well as all sorts of other fun data (sunspots, solar irradiance, etc)

Sadly the data only seems to go back to 1980, but perhaps there are some interesting divergences to pick our relating to the time the data collection procedures were changed.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1980/trend/plot/rss/from:1980/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1980/trend/plot/uah/from:1980/trend

and then the_doctor said...

re:http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/Peterson-Vose-1997.pdf

This links to how data gets adjusted to try to account for UHI, missing data and dishomogeneity in data sets. I've described what is wrong with these methods elsewhere. (http://daviditronclimate.wordpress.com)

The disaster I refer to in this post is the systematic elimination of data.

enthemic said...

Oh I just found another site that lets you play with climate data:

http://labs.geo.me/climate_data

This one lets you play with the data from 1.5k or so WMO land stations.

enthemic said...

And here's the latest 'decade in review' press release (and cool map) from NASA. As this is directly based on those data sets it would be interesting to see a comparison image which highlights the geographical areas with missing/omitted/deleted data. Do you know if any such initiative?

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/temp-analysis-2009.html

enthemic said...

I would like more info on what data was "deleted" - in reading the original paper it sounds more like the raw data was simply not included directly in their calculations, rather than being deleted. (I agree that not including data just seems ridiculous)

For example, with a quick google search I was able to find archives containing all of the USCHN station data going back a long long ways - suggesting that this data has not actually been "deleted". Which record sets are the ones which they claim are deleted?

Thanks.