Wolf Howling: NASA

Showing posts with label NASA. Show all posts

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Hansen Not Even Trying To Hide The Decline Anymore

Why is the off the rails, capitalism hating uber warmie James Hansen still working at NASA and riding herd over our temperature records? Indeed, why is he not in jail for fraud, since he is cooking the books and becoming personally wealthy for doing so? These are but two of the life's perplexing mysteries.

How blatant is Hansen these days about his cooking the temps? This catch from Willis Eschenbach posting at Watts Up With That:

. . . Hansen’s paper says the following (emphasis mine):

The precision achieved by the most advanced generation of radiation budget satellites is indicated by the planetary energy imbalance measured by the ongoing CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) instrument (Loeb et al., 2009), which finds a measured 5-year-mean imbalance of 6.5 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009). Because this result is implausible, instrumentation calibration factors were introduced to reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models, 0.85 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009).
I bring it up because it is climate science at its finest. Since the observations were not of the expected range, rather than figure out why the results might be wrong, they just twisted the dials to “reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models.”

And curiously, the “imbalance suggested by climate models”, of some 0.85 W/m2, was actually from Hansen’s previous paper. That earlier paper of his, by coincidence called “Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications“, gave that 0.85 W/m2 figure as a result from Hansen’s own GISS climate model … but all this incestuous back-slapping is probably just another coincidence.

Of course, you know what all this means. Soon, the modelers will be claiming that the CERES satellite results verify that the GISS and other climate models are accurately duplicating observations …

Hansen isn't even trying to hide his bastardization of the numbers. If he doesn't like the result, he just changes it. And you don't need a PhD in physics to understand that to go from 6.5 to .85 is change by an order of magnitude.

It really is too bad that Rick Perry, the one person running for the nomination who actually gets that this is all the world's greatest scam, is simply unable to articulate it. All he would have to say is that the whole temperature record is untrustworthy and that climate scientists are refusing to subject their work to the scientific method, instead trying to argue that a corrupt peer review process should substitute. That isn't science.

At any rate, step one to sanity is to fire James Hansen and everyone under him at NASA. Step two is to open up the temprature record to full transparency, including all raw data and all of the underlying math used to arrive at the final numbers. Step three is to withhold all future funding from institutions and individuals that publish findings that do not allow for full replication by the scientific method. Step four is to start putting warmie frauds in jail. Hansen, Gore and Mann should be sharing a jail cell if there is any justice in the cosmos.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

James Hansen - Enemy of the State; Enemy of Humanity: So Why Is He Still Employed By NASA?

James Hansen is the Bernie Madoff of climate science. He heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), from which position he lords over our nation's temperature records, both current and historic. Why he is still in that position is a mystery; that he is still in that position is a criminal travesty.

He is a completely off the rails warmie. He is one of the originators of AGW theory and he has been predicting the end of the world from man-made global warming for decades. For but one of countless examples, in 1988, he delved into pure fantasy, predicting a rise in average temperatures by 9 deg, F. by 2040. In 2008, he opined that the comparatively warm winters in the UK were a clear sign of global warming - an opion immediately followed by three severe winters in the UK. He has called for jailing people who disagree with the theory of antrhopogenic global warming. He recently endorsed a book calling for green sabotage and an end to industrial civilization as the only means to save the planet. Not long ago, he announced that he is spending his time preparing briefs intended to be used in law suits against our government. And several years ago, he was a defense witness for activists charged with damaging a coal fired power station in Kent. He justified their actions on his belief that the damage they caused was far outweighed by the damage to our planet from a coal fired power station.

He is both slopppy and dishonest. His manipulation of our temperature data has been blatant and obvious, as Joe D'Aleo amply demonstrates in a recent publication. Hansen has manipulated the data to make older temperatures appear colder and more recent temperatures appear warmer. While the results of his acts are documented, his work product is not. He refuses to release the algorithms he uses to modify the data, nor does he attempt to justify the modifications. When he recently claimed that 2010 was the warmest year on record, it was issued with a level of trustworthiness somewhere below that of a profit and loss accounting statement from Enron. To quote Powerline: "Under his guidance, NASA's data have become so unreliable as to be an embarrassment to any scientists who may still be in the picture."

And he now has pledged his allegiance to Communist China. This from the Washington Examiner:

The nation's most prominent publicly funded climatologist is officially angry about [Congress's failure to pass cap and trade], blaming democracy and citing the Chinese government as the "best hope" to save the world from global warming. He also wants an economic boycott of the U.S. sufficient to bend us to China's will.

NASA laboratory head James Hansen's anti-democracy rants were published while he was on a November junket in China . . .

According to Mr. Hansen, compared to China, we are "the barbarians" with a "fossil-money- 'democracy' that now rules the roost," making it impossible to legislate effectively on climate change. Unlike us, the Chinese are enlightened, unfettered by pesky elections. . . .

Mr. Hansen has another idea to circumvent our democracy. Because Congress is not likely to pass any legislation making carbon-based energy prohibitively expensive, he proposed, in the South China Morning Post, that China lead a boycott of our economy:

"After agreement with other nations, e.g., the European Union, China and these nations could impose rising internal carbon fees. Existing rules of the World Trade Organization would allow collection of a rising border duty on products from all nations that do not have an equivalent internal carbon fee or tax.

"The United States then would be forced to make a choice. It could either address its fossil-fuel addiction ... or ... accept continual descent into second-rate and third-rate economic well-being."

We got Van Jones out of office as the green jobs czar. Hansen is exponentially worse than Jones. He is certainly not a scientist. He is an advocate - and a completely committed one at that. There has to be some way of getting this joker off the government payroll.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Gorebull Warming Update

I. How does the global warming canard stay alive? It does so with wholly biased reporting and cynical manipulation of public opinon through programming such as:

(H/T EU Referendum)

II. James Hansen of NASA and his undocumented, everchanging historical record of our temperatures sorely needs to be the subject of a Congressional, if not criminal, investigation.

III. At Watts Up With That, a scientist attempts to reverse engineer one of the computer models relied upon to claim that our climate will turn into a man-made inferno but a century or so into the future. He finds it simplistic indeed. But why is he having to reverse engineer a computer model being relied upon to drive public policy you might ask? Because, even a year on from Climategate, none of the entities involved in pushing climate change have taken to releasing their facts, figures, math and programming that would allow the world to actually check them. The scientific method is looked upon as a distraction to these people, who brook no interference with their narrative. This really is criminal. As I have said before, government employees who do this should be fired. Academics who do it as part of studies undertaken on the public dime should be excluded by law from receiving any more public funding.

IV. The latest apocalyptic warmie nonsense: "The Oceans Are Acidifying!!! We are D-O-O-M-E-D." David Middleton investigates, asking three questions: One, is atmospheric CO2 acidifying the oceans? Two, is there any evidence that reefs and other marine calcifers have been damaged by CO2-driven ocean acidification and/or global warming? And three, does the geological record support the oceanic acidification hypothesis? Answers: No, no and no.

V. It is always worthwhile to listen when MIT's Dr. Richard Lindzen speaks, and he does so in this instance opining that the AGW theory is, in the paraphrase of Q&O, driven by money, politics and dubious science:

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. . . .

Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat.

For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause. The earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Recent work (Tsonis et al, 2007), suggests that this variability is enough to account for all climate change since the 19th Century. . . .

With all this at stake, one can readily suspect that there might be a sense of urgency provoked by the possibility that warming may have ceased and that the case for such warming as was seen being due in significant measure to man, disintegrating. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed. However, for more serious leaders, the need to courageously resist hysteria is clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever present climate change is no substitute for prudence. Nor is the assumption that the earth’s climate reached a point of perfection in the middle of the twentieth century a sign of intelligence.

VI. All of the malignant illnesses that plagued climate science pre-Climate Gate are still very much in evidence a year on from that scandal. William Esenbach discusses this travesty in an Open Letter To Dr. Trenberth, posted at WUWT, responding to Trenberth's recent outrageous claim that, given that the canard of man-made global warming is subject to overwhelming proof, it now falls to its critics to disprove the theory. As I stated a few weeks ago, a question that should be asked of every warmie is what evidence needs to be proven that would show that the theory of man-made global warming is false.

VII. If you think you're being fleeced by the warmies - you are more right than you know. Probably the most galling part of all of this is that they are doing it on our tax dime - billions of our tax dimes, to be precise, taken from us at the point of the IRS gun. PJM has the facts and figures.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

The Fundamental Lack of Trustworthiness of The Theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming

I have blogged on this issue before, but it bears repeating. The above graph shows two vastly different world temperature averages over the past century, but both are from Jim Hansen at NASA and both are based on the same data.

Prior to 2007, NASA showed a world (red line) whose average temperatures were relatively stable from 1880 to about 1998, when world temperatures declined for about a decade. Post 2007, NASA showed a world (black line) that was once cool in the 1880's with the temperatures rising until 1998 when they shot through the roof. Huh? Just who are we to believe, NASA or . . . well . . . NASA? What could possibly justify this massive adjustment to the historical record?

People need to understand that the most fundamental aspect of climate science - measuring prior temperatures to compare them against current temps - lacks any iota of trustworthiness. And that is due not just to the Hansenesque hidden methodology and unsubstantiated changes to actual "raw data," but that the data collection stations themselves have numerous issues of reliability.

At any rate, the graph shows how Jim Hansen at NASA adjusted the historical temperature record in 2007 when the weather wasn't cooperating with the theory of global warming. It is how he is able to claim that we are in the hottest decade on record. It is not merely pure - and costly - fantasy, it is criminal.

As Real Science comments, "If nature won’t cooperate and produce some actual warming, someone has to do the dirty work for her."

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Interesting Links

While solar energy in the developed world is still not cost effective, solar energy is making a real difference in areas of the world far from a power grid.

The war on plant food continues apace as global warming facists seek to continue their scam. Record snow and cold are blanketing the world, sea ice is growing in Antarctica (home to over 90% of the world's sea ice), and all the computer models used by the UN IPCC to forecast massive global warming were proven worthless when they failed to forecast the cooling that took place over the past decade. Yet Jim Hansen at NASA is trying to tell us that the past decade really has been the hottest on record, and that 2010 really has been the hottest year on record. How he gets there is by playing fast and loose with the "raw data," the math and the "smoothing." Who are you going to believe, Jim Hansen or your lying frozen thermometer.

And after years of assuring us that, with global warming, winters would become ever more mild, the greenies have had a sudden epiphany. Judah Cohen tells us today that global warming causes global cooling. Fancy that. To quote from Dr. Richard North: "In the end, there are going to be two groups of people in this world: the greenies and the people who shoot greenies. It's kill or be killed, and the greenies will be the death of us all if this madness continues." Where did I put the keys to my gun rack . . . ?

States and localities that have suffered from decades of Democratic misrule will soon have to pay the piper for their Faustian bargains with public sector unions. As George Will points out, that payment should not come from the rest of America.

Via Larwyn's Linx, our nation suffers from historical illiteracy. A nation that does know its history cannot defend it, and thus it is prey to the machinations of those who want to radically change it.

Britain's Muslim problem is apparently getting worse. Leaked cables reveal that a third of Britain's Muslim population supports killing in the name of Allah. The British solution - now adopted by the Obama administration - of pretending that the problem is not within Islam itself is not working - and indeed, it is making matters harder for those Muslims who want to reform their religion. As the text of a symposium of M. Zhudi Jasser, Tawfiq Hamid, Robert Spencer and Timothy Furnish makes clear, the problem is daunting.

Wrapping Christmas gifts - it's an art form.

And lastly, from American Digest with some prodding from The Anchoress, there is this from Loreena McKinnett.

The lyrics are from a poem written by St. John of the Cross in the late 1500's.

Monday, July 5, 2010

NASA - No More Manned Space Exploration, Now Muslim Outreach

This is beyond belief.

Obama has taken us out of the manned space exploration game. With NASA on the verge of being superfulous, he has given them new orders. Priority one - engage in Muslim outreach to make them feel good about their contributions to science and mathematics. Priority two, as Mr. Bolden makes clear in the al Jazeera interview below, is apparently to downplay America's role in America's achievements.

As an aside, the reality is that "contributions" to science and math emenating out of Muslim countries virtually all occurred a millenium ago. A bankrupt Islamic culture since then has generated very few "contributions" to science. But we do want them to feel good about themselves.

Could there be a greater misuse of taxpayer funds?

Friday, December 18, 2009

Climategate Update 24: Watermelons, A Message From God?, Carbon Trading Scam, Follow The Money,

IF there is any doubt that greens are true watermelons - green on the outside, red on the inside, listen to Hugo Chavez condemn capitalism to great applause at the IPCC meeting in Copenhagen.

While outside, it was a reverse watermelon, with the red being worn on the outside.

Meanwhile, if you want proof of the existence of God, just look to Copenhagen. As the IPCC conference goes into its final day while Gore et al try to convince us that global warming is real and a hot catastrophe is just around the corner, a blizzard is going on outside:

World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.

“Temperatures will stay low at least the next three days,” Henning Gisseloe, an official at Denmark’s Meteorological Institute, said today by telephone, forecasting more snow in coming days. “There’s a good chance of a white Christmas.” . . .

Denmark has a maritime climate and milder winters than its Scandinavian neighbors. It hasn’t had a white Christmas for 14 years . . . and only had seven last century. Temperatures today fell as low as . . . 25 Fahrenheit.

Ace of Spades ponders whether God may be trying to give all of us - and in particular the Goracle - a message? Could it be that bit about "Thou shall have no other God . . ."

At any rate, this led Ace to do a riff on the arguments for and against the existence of God from the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:

The pratical upshot of all this is that is that wherever Albert Arnold Gore, Junior, chief evangelist for the Cult of the Virgin Gaia, goes, spreading his Gospel of a rapidly-warming earth, the weather suddenly takes an intense turn to the frigid and starts dumping snow on every SUV and private jet in his carbon-throbbing vehicular entourage.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly ironic could happen, and continue happening, and happen and happen and happen and then happen again some more, purely by chance, and without some Divine Hand manipulating the cosmic weather machine, that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. . .

Heh. Do read the whole post.

The only thing standing in the way of a binding deal to soak the West and regulate carbon world-wide, all in the name of ~~world socialism~~ anthropogenic global warming (AGW), is, in what has to be the world's greatest irony in all of recorded history, communist China. The fact that the Chinese realize world socialism isin't such a great idea - since they practiced it in their own country until the death of Mao - ought to tell us all something. Amazing, isin't it, that the last stalwart defender of capitalism - and perhaps the savior of it if they remain firm - will be a communist country.

Interestingly enough, it was recently leaked that the UN IPCC's call for carbon reduction targets are insufficient to ward off their own most likely scenarios for catastrophe. If that is the case, then the primary motivaters at the Copenhagen conference must be something other than saving Gaia at all costs.

There are certainly many vested interests driving Copenhagen - and their motivations all boild down to power and money. As to the latter, the rent-seekers stand to profit immensely from carbon regulation and the global carbon trading scheme. That scheme is threatened if a new deal is not put in place tomorrow. At least one outlet is saying that the grand bargain today will be a deal to keep Kyoto in place amongst the signatories and add a non-binding agreement for non-signatories, such as the U.S. As EU Referendum points out, such a deal will keep the carbon trading scheme alive:

[T]he deal is that the Kyoto Protocol is saved – which is what all the fuss was really about. That safeguards the carbon market and opens the way for it to expand to the $2-trillion level by the year 2020. Against that, even €100 billion is chump-change - you can buy countries with that sort of money.

Their deal in place, the kleptocrats and the Corporatocracy can go away happy and plan how to spend all their ill-gotten gains, leaving the leaders to grandstand, make their deals, shake hands and strut through their photo-sessions before jetting off in olumes of "carbon" to be greeted as saviours by their underwhelmed peoples.

As for saving the planet, well no-one really believes that greenie shit anyway ... except the greenies, and they don't matter. There is plenty of pepper spray left and no shortage of temporary detention space. Now that the money men have got what they came for, all the rest is theatre.

If one wanted to truly regulate carbon, then there would be a simple carbon tax, perhaps varied by industry and based on the ease with which the particular industry could regulate carbon output. Instead, there is the carbon trading scheme that is, one a massive distortion of free markets, and two, an invitation to fraud, corruption, and gamesmanship.

According to a recent PJM article, the Europeant carbon trading scheme (ETS) that went into effect five years ago has driven up energy prices in Europe by as much as 20% for the rank and file. It has proven a cesspool of fraud, with organized crime exploiting the interplay between carbon credits and the EU VAT tax system. And indeed, "Europol says that in some EU countries, up to 90 percent of the entire market volume is fraudulent." But probably the worst aspect of the ETS is how it has distorted the marketplace. This from PJM:

. . . For example, European steelmakers have threatened to leave the EU for India, eliminating the jobs of up to 90,000 European workers in the process, unless the EU grants the steelmakers free carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of euros. As a result, ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel company, has gained windfall profits in the form of carbon credits worth nearly €1 billion, for which it paid nothing. By 2012, ArcelorMittal will have accumulated surplus permits for 80 million tons of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to the pollution generated annually by all of Denmark.

ArcelorMittal is now free to sell its surplus carbon credits on the market or to hoard them for future use. If it hangs on to them, the company will be able to avoid cutting greenhouse gas emissions possibly for decades, effectively undermining the ETS. According to Sandbag, a British NGO that campaigns to improve carbon trading, the EU’s ETS has been turned into “a system for generating free subsidies.”

Even Rajendra K Pachauri, who has been the chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2002, has been suspected of having a role in gaming the EU system to profit from the trade in carbon credits. The Mumbai-based Tata Group, an Indian multinational conglomerate which has business ties to Pachauri (who accepted the Nobel Peace Price on behalf of the IPCC (which it shared with Al Gore in 2007) for its work on global warming), may stand to make several hundred million euros in EU carbon credits simply by closing a steel production facility in Britain. . . .

The WSJ expounds on the plant closing discussed in the above paragraph. That closing saw 1700 British workers loose their job and saw the plant moved to India - meaning that there was no reduction in carbon released into the atmosphere. Tata made a windfall. It would be hard to find any better example with which to indict the entire carbon trading morass. As the WSJ concludes:

To summarize: Cap and trade is a scheme that would impose heavy carbon taxes and allowances on U.S. industries, which would then have an incentive to move overseas themselves, or to sell those allowances to overseas companies that could use them to become more competitive against U.S. companies. Like the 1,700 Brits at Redcar, American workers would be the big losers.

If that is not market distortion on steroids, nothing is. And the people paying for it, in higher energy bills and lost jobs, are the rank and file.

The rent seekers won't be the only one's walking away from Copenhagen with their gravy train intact. The third world kleptocrats have a friend in the Obama administration, which, through Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, announced that the U.S. will take part in sending $100 billion a year to either the World Bank or the UN to distribute as they see fit to further the third world's fight against AGW. My ability to state all of the above without a single vulgarity has reduced to zero my reserve of self discipline. I will go Galt before I see a penny of my taxes to this socialist insanity.

Charlie Martin, writing at PJM, notes that, as more data is made public - even beyond the bombshell Russian reveleations of the other day - the more we are finding inexplicable anecdotes wherein AGW scientists have made large upward adjustments to raw temperatures that could not possibly be justified. These include:

- Radical and inexplicable adjustments to the temperature record for Central Park

- Darwin Zero (see here and here)

- The Keenan study comparing raw temperature data for Alaska to the "corrected, homogenized and cooked IPCC data the IPCC is using for Alaska

- Nashville, where Anthony Watts finds a slight 130 year cooling trend from the raw data that the IPCC has somehow turned into a warming trend.

- Antarctica, where the GHCN has removed inconvienient data points. Digging into it further, it became apparent that the GHCN based its homogonized and cooked warming ternd on a single station in Antarctica - Rothra Station - the one in a heat island that shows anamolous warming.

And as Joseph D'Aleo points out at PJM, it would appear that the adjusted data used by the CRA - that we now learn was cherry picked in Russia and, as we see in the examples above, tortured above - is virtually the exact same figures used by Hadley, NASA, amd GHCN. Further, he points out all the difficulties apparent in trying to determine "global" temperatures, not the least of which are major declines in the number of monitoring stations, incomplete data sets, and the use of the remaining stations to extrapolate temperatures of locations at great distance away - indeed, 1000 kilometers and more.

Bishop Hill looks at the revelations from Russia yesterday - that the IPCC and Hadley have cooked the Russian books to show AGW in that country where the data indicates none exists - from the standpoint of "gatekeeping. As he notes:

. . .at least some sceptics simply gave up trying to get their views published because they knew they could not get their findings past the gatekeepers. This demonstrates that the IPCC reports can never be anything other than biased. The scientific literature does not represent the collected knowledge mankind has about the climate. It represents the collected views of part of the climatological community.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Climategate Update 22: Hiding The Raw Data, Gore's Mosquitos, & The Smart Grid

Double click on the graph above, showing Orland GISS data plotted in June 2007, to see how it is plotted today, showing data recently deleted from the public record maintained by NASA.

The more global warming rocks are kicked over, the more the stench of corruption rises to our collective noses. Several days ago, we learned about how the AGW cabal had "adjusted" the raw data for the temperature monitoring station at Darwin, a station that is now in a "heat island." Thus, any adjustments to Darwin's raw data should have been downward. Instead, a correction was applied that raised the temperature significantly in the past few years. True, that could have been an anamoly. But now as more attention is drawn to this issue, the more we see similar fraud being repeated:

For the past six days, several climate scientists have discovered an alarming trend: clear evidence of alteration of historical data at weather stations around the world, in order to support the contention of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

The changes appear to affect the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), a project of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climate Data Center. Note that this is the same agency that employs Dr. Eugene Wahl, who might be implicated in the research misconduct allegations made against Michael E. Mann at Penn State University.

Richard Keen at the University of Colorado was the first to notice the changes. On December 5, he published this report comparing his own research into the climate of Alaska with the official version of the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC). He found no evidence of warming in Alaska over the past three decades, and no substantial difference in average temperature between 1935-1944 and the present time. Overall he found a warming trend of 0.69 Kelvin per century over the span of the twentieth century--while the GHCN dataset projects a warming trend of 2.83 K/century. (The Kelvin is the International System equivalent of a Celsius degree.) . . .

Today, Anthony Watts himself reported on a comment by a reader on the most disturbing finding yet: several GISS station datasets have been altered. The only reason why Watts and his commenter could detect the deletion is that Watts had saved the data from two of the affected weather stations (Orland, CA and Fairmont, CA) two years ago. The alteration at Orland is more serious: prior temperature records (between ca. 1880 and 1900), clearly warmer than subsequent temperatures, are now missing. Those data were in place as recently as 29 December 2008 and are not present today. [Double-click on the graph at the top of this post]. By way of explanation, the GISS data selector (captured by Watts) says this:
Note to prior users: We no longer include data adjusted by GHCN and have renamed the middle option (old name: prior to homogeneity adjustment).
Watts suggests that the problem might be not with the GISS data but with the GHCN dataset upon which GISS depends for historical data.

Developing...

Developing indeed. And much more on this from Joseph D'Aleo writing at PJM:

Climategate has sparked a flurry of examinations of the global data sets — not only at CRU, but in nations worldwide and at the global data centers at NOAA and NASA. Though the Hadley Centre implied their data was in agreement with other data sets and thus trustworthy, the truth is other data centers are complicit in the data manipulation fraud.

The New Zealand Climate Coalition had long solicited data from New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA), which is responsible for New Zealand’s National Climate Database. For years the data was not released, despite many requests to NIWA’s Dr. Jim Salinger — who came from CRU. With Dr. Salingers’ departure from NIWA, the data was released and showed quite a different story than the manipulated data. The raw data showed a warming of just 0.06C per century since records started in 1850. This compared to a warming of 0.92C per century in NIWA’s (CRU’s) adjusted data.

Willis Eschenbach, in a guest post on Anthony Watts’ blog, found a smoking gun at Darwin station in Australia. Raw data from NOAA (from their GHCN, Global Historical Climate Network, that compiled data that NASA and Hadley work with) showed a cooling of 0.7C. After NOAA “homogenized” the data for Darwin, that changed dramatically. . . .

He found similar discrepancies in the Nordic countries. And that same kind of unexplainable NOAA GHCN adjustment was made to U.S. stations.

In this story, see how Central Park data was manipulated in inconsistent ways. The original U.S. Historical Climate Network (USHCN) data showed a cooling to adjust for urban heat island effect — but the global version of Central Park (NOAA GHCN again) inexplicably warmed Central Park by 4F. The difference between the two U.S. adjusted and global adjusted databases, both produced by NOAA NCDC, reached an unbelievable 11F for Julys and 7F annually! Gradually and without notice, NOAA began slowly backing off the urban heat island adjustment in the USHCN data in 1999 and eliminated it entirely in 2007.

Anthony Watts, in his surfacestations.org volunteer project “Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?”, found that of the 1000-plus temperature recording stations he had surveyed (a 1221-station network), 89% rated poor to very poor – according to the government’s own criteria for siting the stations.

Perhaps one of the biggest issues with the global data is station dropout after 1990. Over 6000 stations were active in the mid-1990s. Just over 1000 are in use today. The stations that dropped out were mainly rural and at higher latitudes and altitudes — all cooler stations. This alone should account for part of the assessed warming. China had 100 stations in 1950, over 400 in 1960, then only 25 by 1990. This changing distribution makes any assessment of accurate change impossible.

No urbanization adjustment is made for either NOAA or CRU’s global data, based on flawed papers by Wang (1990), Jones (1990), and Peterson (2003). The Jones and Wang papers were shown to be based on fabricated China data. Ironically, in 2008 Jones found that contamination by urbanization in China was a very non-trivial 1C per century — but that did not cause the data centers to begin adjusting, as that would have eliminated global warming.

Continent after continent, researchers are seeing no warming in the unprocessed data (see one thorough analysis here).

Just as the Medieval Warm Period made it difficult to explain why the last century of warming could not be natural (which the hockey stick team attempted to make go away), so did the warm spike in the 1930s and 1940s. In each of the databases, the land data from that period was adjusted down. And Wigley suggested that sea surface temperatures could likewise be “corrected” down by 0.15C, making the results look both warmer but still plausible.

Wigley also noted:
Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.
NOAA complied in July 2009 — removing the satellite input from the global sea surface temperature assessment (the most complete data in terms of coverage), which resulted in an instant jump of 0.24C in ocean temperatures.

Is NASA in the clear? No. They work with the same base GHCN data, plus data from Antarctica (SCAR). To their credit, they attempt to consider urbanization — though Steve McIntyre showed they have poor population data and adjust cities warmer as often as they do colder. They also constantly fiddle with the data. John Goetz showed that 20% of the historical record was modified 16 times in the 2 1/2 years ending in 2007. . . .

Some have suggested that confirmation bias may be responsible for the multiplicity of questionable data and studies that we are seeing. But things such as the changed historical data, Mann's Hockey Stick, hiding Briffa's decline, the Yamal tree ring data, the Rothera Station study - these are acts of knowing fraud. These are things that any non-scientist can look at and, when shown the sleight of hand involved in their creation, can grasp immediately how they have been conned. These are obviously not the work of mere unconscious bias.

And speaking of knowing fraud . . . entymologist Paul Reiter takes Gore - and in particular his advisors - to task for their complete misstatements of fact in his area of expertise - malaria. According to Gore, global warming means that the "tropical" disease of malaria will explode throughout the world due to global warming. This from Paul Reiter writing in The Spectator:

. . . I am a scientist, not a climatologist, so I don’t dabble in climatology. My speciality is the epidemiology of mosquito-borne diseases. As the film began, I knew Mr Gore would get to mosquitoes: they’re a favourite with climate-change activists. When he got to them, it was all I feared.

In his serious voice, Mr Gore presented a nifty animation, a band of little mosquitoes fluttering their way up the slopes of a snow-capped mountain, and he repeated the old line: Nairobi used to be ‘above the mosquito line, the limit at which mosquitoes can survive, but now…’ Those little mosquitoes kept climbing.

The truth? Nairobi means ‘the place of cool waters’ in the Masai language. The town grew up around a camp, set up in 1899 during the construction of a railway, the famous ‘Lunatic Express’. There certainly was water there — and mosquitoes. From the start, the place was plagued with malaria, so much so that a few years later doctors tried to have the whole town moved to a healthier place. By 1927, the disease had become such a plague in the ‘White Highlands’ that £40,000 (equivalent to about £350,000 today) was earmarked for malaria control. The authorities understood the root of the problem: forest clearance had created the perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. The disease was present as high as 2,500m above sea level; the mosquitoes were observed at 3,000m. And Nairobi? 1,680m.

These details are not science. They require no study. They are history. But for activists, they are an inconvenient truth, so they ignore them. Even if Mr Gore is innocent, his advisers are not. They have been spouting the same nonsense for more than a decade. As scientists, we have repeatedly challenged them in the scientific press, at meetings and in news articles, and we have been ignored.

In 2004, nine of us published an appeal in the Lancet: ‘Malaria and climate change: a call for accuracy’. Clearly, Mr Gore didn’t read it. In 2000, I protested when Scientific American published a major article loaded with the usual misrepresentations. And when I watched his animated mosquitoes, his snow-capped mountain was oddly familiar. It took a few moments to click: the images were virtually identical to those in the magazine. The author of the article, Dr Paul Epstein, features high in Gore’s credits.

Dr Epstein is a member of a small band dedicated to a cause. And their work gains legitimacy, not by scholarship, but by repetition. While they publish their work in highly regarded journals, they don’t write research papers but opinion pieces and reviews, with little or no reference to the mainstream of science. The same claims, the same names; only the order of authors change. I have counted 48 separate pieces by just eight activists. They are myth-makers. And all have been lead authors and/or contributory authors of the prestigious IPCC assessment reports.

Take their contention, for example, that as a result of climate change, tropical diseases will move to temperate regions and malaria will come to Britain. If they bothered to learn about the subject, they would know that in a period climatologists call the Little Ice Age, when Charles II held ice parties on the Thames, malaria — ‘the ague’ — was rampant in the Essex marshes, on a par even with regions in Africa today. In the 18th century, the great systematist Linnaeus wrote his doctorate on malaria in central Sweden. In 1922-23 a massive epidemic swept the Soviet Union as far north as Archangel, on the Arctic circle, killing an estimated 600,000 people. And malaria was only eliminated from the Soviet Union and large areas of Europe in the 1950s, after the advent of DDT. So it’s hardly a tropical disease. And yet when we put this information under the noses of the activists it is ignored: ours is the inconvenient truth. . . .

Another good read out today is from Dafydd ab Hugh at Big Lizards. Dafydd hypothesizes that the "environmentalist" movement . . . [is] anti-human insanity. He then sets to proving his hypothesis. It's an excellent post I strongly recommend.

Lastly, one of the pushes of the environmentalist movement is to adopt the "smart grid" technology. The smart grid does not create a single new kilowat of power, nor, for that matter, does it make the power grid necessarily more secure. It involves installing computer controlled utility meters in individual houses and businesses. These meters are able to show individuals, in real time, how much electricity they are using. It also feeds information directly back to the power company so that they have no need to send out meter readers. But it comes with serious issues. Some where discussed in WaPo today:

. . . Customers in California are in open revolt, and officials in Connecticut and Texas are questioning whether the rush to install meters benefits the public.

Some consumers argue that the meters are logging far more kilowatt hours than they believe they are using. And many find it unfair that they will begin to pay immediately for the new meters through higher rates, when the promised savings could be years away.

Wapo goes on to discuss numerous customers complaining of being overcharged in light of their past electric usage history. But Wapo ignores perhaps the most fundamental issue with these "smart grid" meters - the power companies now control your thermostat and other electric usage. This are some of the comments to a PJM article on the smart grid, extolling its virtures. The commentors did not share the joy:

HoosierHawk:

Another writer pushing something that they have no understanding of. Why can’t authors self limit themselves to things that they know about? Probably because they don’t know what they don’t know.

Now why would a “smart” grid be better than a “stupid” grid? If ever there was an obvious case of marketing duping the uninformed this is it. Smart is better than stupid, it has to be better! Smart is good, we all know that.

Ask a few smart questions, like, is there going to be more generating capacity? No, it’s not about that. Are there going to be higher capacity transmission routes installed? Ah, no that’s not going to occur. Will it prevent terrorists from causing problems? Well actually it may enable them to do so, as it will create many more avenues for causing trouble, and allow them do remotely, what they now need to do in person, like shutting down a transformer.

What exactly is a smart grid all about? They call it smart because they will be transmitting encoded information over the power lines. Bear in mind that power lines don’t have shielding to prevent RF leakage for the high frequency signals required, so there will be all kinds of interference to radio transmissions, particularly in the shortwave bands.

What are the advantages? It will enable real time monitoring of electrical usage by individuals, and allow the control of that usage. It doesn’t create any more of what we need nor does it create the pathways needed to bring it to us. It allows them to control us.

We already have smart grid technology where I live. The power company doesn’t have to send anyone out to read our meter every month, they know exactly what we are using all the time. Our electric company doesn’t have any generating capacity of their own, they only buy it, and distribute it. When the price of electricity rises during times of peak usage, they send a signal that shuts off our water heater, it saves them money. Oh don’t worry you’ll get used to a cold shower, may not like it, but you will get used to it, we have. I have a 7 year old, modern house, but don’t have a choice about the temp of my shower. Progress is wonderful.

The next step is to make more appliances smart – air conditioning for example. You don’t really need it and hey the power company can make more money if you let them control it. It’s not that they don’t have power, they would just rather not sell it right now, it saves them money.

The final step is to start billing based on WHEN you use the power. That way when the factory miles away starts pulling more juice, and generating stations have to start using less efficient “peaking” capacity, they can bill you for it. That way you will learn to shut down your house, so that they can supply the factory using cheaper power.

Personally, I would rather see cheaper generating stations, like nuclear, being built. Instead they want to invest in ways to control and monitor an individuals usage, rather than creating more of what we need. I don’t call that smart, it’s a step backwards.

Chris:

As wife to a former Electrical Engineer in the power industry, now a Production Manager, this article is sheer idiocy. A national power grid does nothing to keep power on. All it does is redistribute power. Which is what most companies are already doing. Only now, the companies are paid for excess production. Once you nationalize the grid, who is in charge of where the power is going? The government employee. How do they determine who pays whom for the load? All it does is allow the government the ability to deny energy to a certain sector or area. And likewise, feed that load to some other area. Sound like wealth redistribution to anyone else?

But most of all, if the grid fails, everyone will be affected. Not just a state or city who rely on a ill run energy company. Poorly run power plants will benefit while those that are well run will be punished. Do we see a pattern here

- - Climate Update 21: AGW Investigation Begins? 100 Reasons AGW Is Natural, Green Profiteers, Conflict Of Interest & Arctic Sea Ice

Monday, June 23, 2008

Blasphemers

Let he who blasphemes suffer the pains of hell until he repents. Or in the modern parlance of NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen, let's jail people for "crimes against humanity" if they should question the dogma of anthropogenic global warming.
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The far left of today have a lot of historical antecedents, particularly among the inquisitors who ruthlessly punished any who questioned their dogma. This from Fox News:

The heads of major fossil-fuel companies who spread disinformation about global warming should be "tried for high crimes against humanity and nature," according to a leading climate scientist.

Dr. James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, sounded the alarm about global warming in testimony before a Senate subcommittee exactly 20 years ago.

He returned to the topic Monday with a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., given to the Worldwatch Institute.

"Special interests have blocked the transition to our renewable energy future," Hansen writes in an opinion piece posted on the institute's Web site. "Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil fuel companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, just as tobacco companies discredited the link between smoking and cancer. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming."

"CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of the long-term consequences of continued business as usual," Hansen continues. "In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature."

Read the entire article. The fact that a sizable portion of the scientific community disagrees with Dr. Hensen's assessment is apparently of no consequence.

This attitude towards free speech and dissent is typical across the spectrum of the radical left today, of which the global warming crowd are but one subset. As we speak, a law school in Massachussets is planning a meeting in September to draw up war crimes charges against Bush, et. al for capital offenses. Obama has said one of his first actions in office will be to initiate criminal investigations of the prior administration. The far left is not merely opposed to freedom of speech, they demonize any who express opinions at variance with their own and they seek to criminalize any dissenting speech.

If not else, people like Dr. Hensen should give everyone renewed resepct for those wise men who drafted our Constitution over two centuries ago. That they thought to include protection of freedom of speech in the very first Amendment of the Bill of Rights seems very prescient at the moment.