Climate Change Deniers

It’s turning out to be a rough year for the Climate Change Deniers, you know, the chaps who deny that the main driver of the Earth’s climate is the Sun.  And it’s a bit embarrassing when a blogger, albeit an older, well-qualified blogger shows up NASA and its claim that 1998 was the warmest year in US history.  Roy Spencer explains:

First, NASA’s James Hansen and his group had to fix a Y2K bug that a Canadian statistician found in their processing of the thermometer data. As a result, 1998 is no longer the warmest year on record in the United States - 1934 is.

Amanda Carpenter got to interview Steven McIntyre, who runs climateaudit.org, and to lead him through his interactions with NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies.

What comes out clearly is that NASA doesn’t really want anyone looking at how they came up with the numbers.  McIntyre knew about the difficulties of normalizing temperature data, given the vagaries of weather stations and their locations, and he was interesting in finding out how NASA adjusted their data.

So, that type of adjustment is a statistical issue that interests me. And, so I wrote to NASA in May and asked them for the source code for the adjustment software that they used to fix these stations and they refused to provide it.

Why on earth, you wonder?  Well, it’s not really remarkable. Data adjustments are fiendishly difficult to do well, and the chances are that NASA’s adjustment is a fudge.  Naturally, they are reluctant to give anyone the chance to look through their data and find problems with it.  Bureaucrats are self-selected for the quiet life.  They don’t want to have to spend all their time explaining their mistakes.

And they were right.  They should never have let that chap Steven McIntyre near their data or anything else.

The bigger problem is that the whole temperature series that is used to validate the global warming hypothesis is probably a gigantic fudge, guided by the knowledge that “of course” the planet is getting warmer, and of course a comprehensive and mandatory global government program is needed to save the planet.

Maybe, of course, the planet is getting warmer, and maybe man is responsible for a good deal of it.  And maybe the Greenland icecap will melt and maybe we will all have to run for higher ground.

That’s an awful lot of maybes when you are proposing to compel people to change their way of life at a cost of trillions of dollars