Rusted Sky

If 3 out of 4 methods of measurement don't agree with the 4th, and there's serious validity questions about #4 - should you accept ithat #4 is right and the others wrong?

Seems like that's what NASA's doing. Odd, isn't it?

Nasa is out of line on global warming - Telegraph

Considering that the measures recommended by the world's politicians to combat global warming will cost tens of trillions of dollars and involve very drastic changes to our way of life, it might be thought wise to check the reliability of the evidence on which they base their belief that our planet is actually getting hotter.

There are four internationally recognised sources of data on world temperatures, but the one most often cited by supporters of global warming is that run by James Hansen of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

Hansen has been for 20 years the world's leading scientific advocate of global warming (and Al Gore's closest ally). But in the past year a number of expert US scientists have been conducting a public investigation, through scientific blogs, which raises large question marks over the methods used to arrive at his figures.

First they noted the increasingly glaring discrepancy between the figures given by GISS, which show temperatures continuing to race upwards, and those given by the other three main data sources, which all show temperatures having fallen since 1998, dropping dramatically in the past year to levels around the average of the past 30 years.

Two sets of data, from satellites, go back to 1979: one produced by Dr Roy Spencer, formerly of Nasa, now at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, the other by Remote Sensing Systems. Their figures correspond closely with those produced by the Hadley Centre for Climate Studies of our own Met Office, based on global surface temperature readings.

Right out on their own, however, are the quite different figures produced by GISS which, strangely for a body sponsored by Nasa, rely not on satellites but also on surface readings. Hansen's latest graph shows temperatures rising since 1880, at accelerating speed in the past 10 years.

The other three all show a flattening out after 2001 and a marked downward plunge of 0.6 degrees Celsius in 2007/8, equivalent to almost all the net warming recorded in the 20th century.

2 and 2? You could flip a coin on validity. 3 against 1? Seems to me you'd be looking real hard at the one that's not lining up with the other three to see if all the data you're using is valid. If it isn't, then you toss out that data set and start fresh. If it IS, then you try to figure out why the other three are so far off.

Over at Wattsupwiththat.com, an effort is being made to survey pretty much all the ground stations in the US to see if there might be environmental factors causing error. And there's been a LOT of error, apparently. You wouldn't think that locating a thermometer next to a blacktop parking lot, a furnace outlet, or an air conditioning unit would skew the record, would ya?

AGW's stopped being about science. Now, it's about politics... and by extension, power gained by control of people through persuasion or coercion.

Add in the fact that the arctic ice is thicker, Australia's having a cold winter, Alaska's having a cold summer, and there's no sunspots...

We may wish for warming in a few years.

J.