A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years…
The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs – run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious “hockey stick” graph – GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic – in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.
You can’t draw a straight line from a single data point – perhaps the world is growing warmer. Like it has done before, for millenia. Perhaps this year is an anomaly, a statistical outlier. Weather ≠ climate.
But the notion of scientific rigor – so critical to the formation of public policy – is called seriously into question when the data are changed to fit the theory rather than the reverse.
All for the best, I’m sure.
[...] Watts Up gets wonky with the science, wonders whether the warming scientists are measuring their own hot air. Well, as NeptLex puts it, garbage in, garbage out. [...]
It’s too late, however. The damage has been done, the headlines written and the communion wafer of Warming has been swallowed again.
How long before we see some reporter with laser-like focus ask some non-believer what they think about October being the warmest on record? Oh, send them to Alaska to beat up on SP with this nonsense.
When you can’t put a finger on any truth, and then you can’t trust science, we have nothing left but po-mo mysticism.
We may as well worship fire. Well, oil.
It’s not this year alone. Most studies show that it has been the last ten years getting cooler.
Lex,
According to what I have read, NASA lumped in data from September in order to get the results they wanted.
James Goddard must be whirling in his grave. Has everyone forgotten last winter already? It was the coldest winter in the U.S. in decades, according to the all-too-fallible record keepers.
Back in the ’60s some clever person wrote a book called “How to Make Statistics Lie For You.” I’m sure there are a lot of dog-eared copies lying around in Washington being snatched up by officials of the New Administration. Maybe now that the Big O’s Blackberry is being taken away by his security people, he’ll have time to bone up on the book.
Marianne
Bas%*rds!
Somehow or other, I find it difficult to believe that it was just a simple error. They’ll do whatever they can to make the facts fit the theory.
It’s looking to me like they had a reasonable theory to begin with, then they stretched, fudged, and cooked some more data to make it a look like a slam dunk. And sell carbon credit$.
Looks to me like integrity may be the next commodity with rapidly dwindling supplies .
P.T. Barnum would have recognized Mr. Gore as a kindred spirit, I’m sure. And didn’t 1998 recently change into 1934 as the warmest year on record due to similar scientific SNAFU’S? Several of my friends are great believers in AGW theory, and I’m convinced it’s replaced religion for them as something to have faith in (and without all those icky moral rules!)
I’m sure Michael Crichton is chuckling up in Heaven.
Looks like Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven were on to something in their book Fallen Angels…
I would say something about Algore and his friend Dr. Hansen but nothing polite comes to mind.
Nothing good comes of mixing politics and science.
John Ringo’s book “The Last Centurion” is mil-sci-fi that takes place in the very near future. Global Warming is one of the top subject…since government forecasters were STILL talking about “warming trends” whilst in the start of an ice age. Some people are just terminally stupid.
Marianne (#5): methinks you refer to How to Lie With Statistics, first published in 1954, still in print and in stock at Amazon, and still worth reading.
Hi Byron – skip the pc and read “The Centurions” by J Larteguy – if you haven’t read it you won’t regret it.
Eric:
That was required reading in my stat course back in the ice age. Still very true today and worth the read.
Eric Wilner … You’re probably right and thanks for the reference. I’ll look it up. It was long ago when I skimmed it, but I do remember enough to realize that newspaper stories about polls are useless unless they tell us the makeup and size of the statistical sample, and the kinds of questions asked, as well as the poll numbers. After all, if your statistical sample is made up of 250 Republicans and 500 Democrats, and you ask them which Presidential candidate they favor, it will be the Democrat who wins, won’t it? Which is one of the reasons that, unlike Bill Clinton, I don’t pay much attention to political polls.
Books on ‘How to Lie With Statistics’ are another story.
Marianne
Marianne
“Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences “, and
“A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper”, both by John Allen Paulos. Amongst other items, why percentages are meaningless if the original quantities cannot be determined.
Cheers
Something that you might want to consider. The VP is the Chief Executive of both NASA and the National Science Foundation. Considering that NASA can’t wipe it’s ass without funding and that the NSF is the controlling factor in most of the scientific grants that are awarded, is it any wonder that we are in this situation?
If your results don’t fit into what they want to hear, they just shut off your funding and give it to someone else who will tell them what they want to hear.
Just think, on Jan. 20 Joe Biden takes over as VP. Anybody want to bet on the development of new data supporting Global Warming?
Jerry Pournelle has said, “You can prove anything if you make up your data.”