Posted: 09/12/2007 | Author: H. Sterling Burnett
Climate Figures Need Scrutiny
Originally Published in: Monterey County Herald
Every time NASA's James Hansen makes a global warming pronouncement, the press treats his words as if they were gospel. When he announced that 1998 was the warmest year on record, it was front page news. The only problem is NASA's "facts" were wrong.
Indeed, just a couple of weeks ago, NASA quietly rewrote U.S. temperature history since 1880. As it turns out, 1934 is now the warmest year on record in the U.S., dropping 1998 to second. In addition, 1921, not 2006, is the third warmest year.
According to the newly reconstructed record, three of the top five warmest years since 1880 occurred before 1940, and six of the 10 warmest years on record occurred before 85 percent of the human-caused greenhouse gas emissions were put into the atmosphere.
It was a Canadian researcher and Internet blogger, Steve McIntyre, who caught the error.
McIntyre worked backward doing a regression to confirm what he suspected - NASA had not accounted for changes in the way it captured and recorded data more than a decade ago.
Hansen's press conferences make great headlines but are a poor substitute for the truth.
The corrected data doesn't mean humans are not causing global warming or that if they are, it would be dangerous.
In the future, good journalists should ask hard questions any time Hansen speaks. For instance: If the U.S. temperature system can have such errors, might not other sources of data be even more flawed?
Here's another: What caused the warming in the early part of the century, or the warming currently being experienced by Mars and other planets, since SUVs and power plants clearly aren't implicated?
Or how about this one: If climate skeptics had been arguing that the data showed the warming of the previous century had been scattered across the decades, but a minor adjustment showed almost all the warming to be clumped in just the past decade, would Hansen and his followers still be claiming the change was "insignificant"?
A few years ago, climate skeptics argued that we couldn't trust the ground-based measuring system's data because they conflicted with the temperature measurements from global satellites, which showed a modest cooling of 0.04 degrees per decade.
Scientists found that the researchers monitoring and maintaining the satellites had failed to account for orbital decay. The satellites still didn't show the earth to be warming. However, scientists within the global warming orthodoxy claimed that the satellites had now confirmed that humans were causing warming. Once again the mainstream media reported this uncritically as fact.
At the very least, Hansen should no longer be treated with deference on matters of global warming. His research should come under as much, if not more, scrutiny in the future as those who question his or other climate prophets' claims.