Breaking news...NASA and NOAA altered climate data for political reasons?

Naturalnews? You have to be joking. Do you have any idea how conspiratorial minded that site is?

Note: For all those 'skeptics' that always state "Everyone knows we are in a warming period" and so on and state that when we make posts debating this people they do really exist.

Edit: It's a sad state o affairs when vairous 'skeptic' sources don't agree.

http://climatecrocks.com/2014/06/25/fox-news-flash...

From IPCC's First Assessment Report (1990) WG1 Fig.7-1 (p.202):

Chapter 7: Observed Climate Variations and Change

"Figure 7.1: Schematic diagrams of global temperature variations since the Pleistocene on three time scales: (a) the last million years, (b) the last ten thousand years and, (c) the last thousand years. The dotted line nominally represents conditions near the beginning of the twentieth century."

http://ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_...

So, according to the IPCC (see link), the earth was mostly cooler than now over the last million years, but hotter than now during (1) a 'Holocene Maximum' at approx 5000-2000BC, and also (2) a 'Medieval Warm Period' at approx 1200AD, but then cooler than now during a 'Little Ice Age' at approx 1600AD, but warming up again now due to 'man-made global warming' carbon emissions.

Many Climate Scientists actually do disagree with the IPCC:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/1000_sci...

For actual freely available data, see: UK Meteorological Office, Exeter, Devon

(download the top line table, Global (NH+SH)/2, 'annual' or 'monthly' excel data, and generate a graph):

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/data/c...

These 4 short YouTube clips explain things quite well (Dr David Evans):

http://www.youtube.com/user/evansdmw/videos?view=0...

>>This story is starting to break worldwide right now across the media<<

Yeah, right.

Try thinking for a change. If there was a shred of truth to this - or even if it was a small lie instead of a really big stupid lie - the US House of Representatives would already be holding hearings. Do you see anything like that happening? Of course not. House Republicans might be pathologically selfish greed-mongers, but they are not stupid.

Every federal agency has the legal authority to investigate fraud - including the power to subpoena witnesses and evidence. Do you see anything like that happening?

The climate data have been relentlessly examined by Deniers for the last 5 years - and to date Deniers cannot point to a single raw temperature measurement from any climate station anywhere in the world that has ever been used by any climate scientist that has been changed or is missing.

What to you call a person too stupid to recognize the most stupid lies in the world and so stupid that they fall for the same stupid lies time-after-time without ever figuring it out - even when it is pointed out to them time-after-time --- an AGW Denier, of course.

The ‘revelations’ come from Steve Goddard. He is one of the most persistent and blatant liars when it comes to climate change. His background is statistics and he uses his knowledge to manipulate climate data. He’s been doing it for years and gets caught out every time.

Goddard seems to think he’s the only person that understands statistics. He isn’t, and that’s his problem. As soon as anyone else who understands the numbers gets hold of Goddard’s work they can unpick it with ease and expose his deceptions. I can’t think of a single occasions when this hasn’t happened.

As well as the NASA / NOAA data, there are several other temperature records including those maintained by sceptical scientists such as Dr’s Roy Spencer and John Christy. All of these records, including the sceptics ones, tally with each other. If any record had been manipulated it would be very obvious.

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EDIT: TO RAISIN CAINE

I respect the fact that you’re intelligent and maintain an open mind when it comes to global warming. If only some of that rationality could be passed on to the more zealous devotees on both sides of the debate.

Steve Goddard (real name Tony Heller) is also intelligent, particularly in areas involving mathematics and statistics. He uses this to his advantage to bamboozle those who are not so numerically inclined. Over the years he has made many claims that he can’t back up, when presented with contrary evidence he refuses to move on his position.

Only once that I know of, did Goddard admit he was wrong, this followed his publication of a piece in The Register in which he manipulated data in such a way that he was able to claim there had been no loss of ice in the Arctic. He also accused the NSIDC of fabricating data to give the impression the ice was melting. After much toing and froing he did admit that he was wrong and the NSIDC were right, although the excuses he used were rather suspect.

In this particular instance what Goddard has done in order to make his erroneous claims is, amongst other things…

a) Claim spaces in coverage were filled with random data that showed a warming bias, this is simply an outright lie.

b) Use absolute temperature data, not anomalies. Thus no allowance was made for data from stations at altitude, in urban areas, in high or low latitudes etc. This method would only work if everywhere on the planet were the same temperature.

c) There was no spatial weighting (even Anthony Watts takes this into consideration) and so there was a significant bias between areas with good coverage and those with little coverage. His figures became averages rather than weighted gridded ones.

In essence he ended up drawing conclusions from averaged absolute values rather than spatially weighted anomalies. We’ll see if he has the integrity to admit his errors, even if he does, I very much doubt the sceptics will take notice and they’ll continue claiming that data are fabricated.

Some people will believe anything that will reinforce what they want to believe. Nevermind that Natural News is founded and run by Mike Adams, an anti-science spin artist that is known in the scientific community as a quack.

If you're going to "break news," at least do it with a reputable source. Right now it smells like you're breaking wind.

I would not call this breaking news as the 1999 change over has been known for some time. I am not sure how or if it even does affect the global data. I think that trevor's analysis has satisfied me that the global data has not been finagled for the past 10 years.

But unlike Trevor, I would not say Goddard is lying, as that 1999 change over is documented and can be found directly at the NASA website.

Trevor,

I actually do not mind the lack of spatial weighting as a method of looking at the sensitivity of modeling. Consider. If more remote locations generally have worse records (which seems plausible), then the fact that they are weighted more heavily could be problematic.

I would never suggest that the non-spatially weighted was the true global average, but it certainly does give insight to whether a problem exists.

As for using temperature and not anamolies, you can make this work if it is done properly. If it is done improperly, it will greatly increase variability.

Either way, I see why you would object to claiming this is a proper analysis, but I also see the value of it as a sensitivity analysis.

A small number of sites cover a large area of the Earth, which could be problematic. But the combination of non-spatial weighting and not using anamolies does create a serious issue. Separately, they are good sensistivity analysis tools. Together, they are nearly useless.

A more accurate way of determining the variability caused by the heavily weighted remote sites would be using a bootstrap method to randomly drop sites using perhaps the same weighting placed on the sites to weight the probability of dropping them.

As for Goddard, I don't think he will admit his error, because he does not view it as an error. He is sort of correct. In essence, the spatial models impute the temperature of most all locations with exception of the point estimates at the locations. That imputation is not random, but based upon the point locations inversely weighted by distance. There are a lot of assumptions made, some of which are certainly wrong. Goddard is not the first statistician to voice serious reservations about spatial modeling. I don't agree with him, but I can't fully defend all of the assumptions made in this type of modeling either. Most of statistics makes use of assumptions that are inherently incorrect. Luckily, the methods are robust enough to not be overly affected by departures from the given assumptions.

It was always hard to take numbers that are only good for 100 years (weather comparisons) against a world that is 4.5 Billion years old. That is to expect to find documentation of 100 against 4,500,000,000, which even a math failure can see is not a percentage. It would be easier to hit the lottery, get hit by lightening, shoot the moon out the sky with a pellet gun, and all the other obscene odds, than to predict global warming on a basis of .00000000045% of fact. The global warming scare is almost as good as the nuclear bomb scare of the 1950's, but less documented.

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