Thursday, December 03, 2009

ClimateGate: The ol' "Their fudged data matches up with our fudged data defense"

Republicans in Congress question AGW consensus:
In the wake of the "Climate-gate" controversy over the CRU Archive and its contents, several prominent Republicans in the House and Senate have called the entire premise of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) into serious question. Congressional Democrats, Obama administration officials, and their allies in the scientific community continue to minimize the affair and insist that AGW is no less real for all the disclosures.

The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a contentious hearing yesterday. NOAA chief administrator Jane Lubchenco and White House Science Czar John Holdren were called to testify. Predictably, Representative F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI-5), the ranking member, challenged both witnesses with multiple excerpts from the CRU e-mails, and also challenged Holdren specifically on his lengthy exchange with Nick Schultz of Tech Central Station concerning Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, who had shown in their paper in Climate Research that sunspot activity correlated well with the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA). (Sensenbrenner did not, according to the AP account, read excerpts from that e-mail, but offered a summary of Holdren's mocking discussion of the two climatologists.) Equally predictably, Holdren and Lubchenco, aided by committee Democrats, dismissed the e-mails as irrelevant to the question, apparently still real to them, of AGW and its deleterious effects.
Remember that these government hacks are in the business of protecting their domain and their ideology and their careers and wallets and their friends:
"The e-mails do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus ... that tells us the earth is warming, that warming is largely a result of human activity," said another government scientist Jane Lubchenco. A marine biologist and climate researcher, she heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The e-mails don't negate or even deal with data from both NOAA and NASA, which keep independent climate records and show dramatic warming, Lubchenco told members of the House global warming committee.
That's some interesting spin, and it isn't JUST the emails that undermine the global warming alarmist position. It's the program code and data that were included in the materials made public. Moreover, NOAA plays around with its data, too:
Many of us have argued for years that much of the measured surface temperature increase has actually been from manual adjustments made for opaque and largely undisclosed reasons by a few guys back in their offices.
The US Historical Climate Network (USHCN) reports about a 0.6C temperature increase in the lower 48 states since about 1940. There are two steps to reporting these historic temperature numbers. First, actual measurements are taken. Second, adjustments are made after the fact by scientists to the data. Would you like to guess how much of the 0.6C temperature rise is from actual measured temperature increases and how much is due to adjustments of various levels of arbitrariness? Here it is, for the period from 1940 to present in the US:
Actual Measured Temperature Increase:
0.1C
Adjustments and Fudge Factors:
0.5C
Total Reported Warming:
0.6C
Yes, that is correct. Nearly all the reported warming in the USHCN data base, which is used for nearly all global warming studies and models, is from human-added fudge factors, guesstimates, and corrections.
I know what you are thinking – this is some weird skeptic’s urban legend. Well, actually it comes right from the NOAA web page which describes how they maintain the USHCN data set. Below is the key chart from that site showing the sum of all the plug factors and corrections they add to the raw USHCN measurements:
and NASA is hiding something as well:
It’s not just the scientists at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University who may have criminally violated the Freedom of Information Act (some profesors in the UK and some in the USA), NASA has been stonewalling a FOIA request as well…for years.
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.

“I assume that what is there is highly damaging,” Mr. Horner said. “These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this.”
NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies is saying they’re “working on” the FOIA request.

Right. For two years?!

The public affairs guy at GISS is using the Sgt. Schultz defense (”I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing!”)
He said he was unfamiliar with the British controversy and couldn’t say whether NASA was susceptible to the same challenges to its data. The White House has dismissed the British e-mails as irrelevant.
Let me get this straight. The CRU data has been faked, but this fake data resembles other "independent" data from other Government Groups (with a political agenda), and those groups have also suspiciously "adjusted" their data and are keeping it from the light of day. This government hack spin defense is, at best, less than compelling, at most, downright perjury. If anything, it's a call to investigate NASA and NOAA's work from the ground up. The entire world of global warming alarmism is crumbling. Unfortunately, the faithful will be the last to know. Maybe, if the pied pipers stop playing that tune, it'll be easier for them to cope.