The world has never seen such freezing heat

The world has never seen such freezing heat

By Christopher Booker, UK Telegraph, 16/11/2008

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.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to

10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

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.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

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Me
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On Fri, 21 Nov 2008 23:00:00 +0000, Me wrote: ...

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Hear, Hear! Rich

Reply to
Richard The Dreaded Libertaria

This Christopher Booker? "The patron saint of charlatans is again spreading dangerous misinformation The Sunday Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker has published 38 articles about asbestos - and every one is wrong"

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I've searched and can't find any such announcement. Do you have a link to one? Does Booker? Could it be he's the one making stuff up, without even the excuse of an error?

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Actually, the 2nd warmest.

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08/oct/glob-oct-pg.gif Maybe he copied that wrong too.

Actually, GISS now reports the corrected October temps as 5th highest in the historical record

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s+dSST.txt; i.e., LESS extreme warmth that NOAA, cited above. Still sticking with that accusation of GISS inventing a phony hotspot to make it look warmer?

You guys not only can't pick 'em, but you figure if you repeat yourselves it will be true.

Reply to
z

The past winter had the most significant La Nina in 20 years. And I suspect that over 99% of the world did not set any alltime temperature lows. Most of the world did not even achieve 20 year temperature lows. The world as a whole achieved only lowest temperature in about 8 years despite greatest surge of a cooling mechanism in 20 years.

And his enemies this year attacked him with cites showing 1998 to be the hottest year globally. That includes Hadley Centre, showing hottest

5-calendar-year-stretch on record to be the one ending before the major 2007-2008 La Nina started.

Because of a major La Nina, looks like most major one in 20 years, and that one still only managed to set 8 year lows in global temperature.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Reply to
Don Klipstein

That unseasonal snow in America's Great Plains mentioned in the second paragraph is something that has always happened every few years. While Philadelphia had unusually late first freezing temperature reading of autumn 2008 being over a week into November.

As for someplace getting "worst snowstorm ever" - I have yet to go more than 3 years in my life without hearing about someplace getting "worst snowstorm ever" since 1977. Some places in the world will actually have snowfall increase (and some of those will have snowfall increasing only temporarily) should global warming proceed as predicted by proponents of its existence.

115 monthly lows in one month in USA among so many thousands of official measuring stations? Looks like not too unusual to me! 70th warmest October out of 114 - so October 2008 was a cooler month that some AGW-denialist saw for making a claim that global warming does not exist (while some of the weather patterns lingering from the greatest La Nina in 20 years still did). What will that source say is the USA's or better still the globe's temperature for the whole year of 2008?

So there's supposed to be lack of AGW if an early self-corrected report from NASA's GISS that October 2008 being the world's hottest October on record can be disproved? How about looking at sources that The Register has used to attack Nasa's GISS earlier this year?

Such as "Temperature Lower Troposphere" channel of RSS interpretation of satellite data on atmospheric temperature? And look at what they have since 1979, as opposed to The Register showing a graph of that over a time period starting with including the 1998 spike from the greatest El Nino on record, and ending with including most of the depths of the greatest La Nina in 20 years. The UAH alternative to RSS for interpretation of satellite atmospheric temperature readings shows a bit less warming than RSS does, but is widely considered less accurate and RSS is good enough for The Register!

How about HadCRUT-3v? The Register used that to attack NASA's GISS and their best-known scientist Hansen. They did so in an article that as of now still exists and links to a current graph of HadCRUT-3v, unsmoothed-annual and smoothed on the same page, and that shows most of the warming that Hansen claimed despite what that article says (and even says with a graph of Hansen global temperature determination with typos in half the figures along the ordinate).

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Keep in mind that NASA's GISS has "anomaly" for global temperature appearing to me to be continuing their definition since they started tracking that to be the 1951-1980 average, while HadCRUT anomalies are from the 1961-1990 average.

And if you don't like NASA's GISS, then have a look at what was used by "The Register" for attacking Nasa's GISS - RSS "temperature lower troposphere" and HadCRUT-3v show most of the global warming that NASA's GISS does!

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Reply to
Don Klipstein

I would like to add that according to HadCRUT-3, October 1998 was the world's 6th warmest October on record.

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Same story according to HadCRUT-3v, good enough for The Register to use to attack NASA's GISS (and the scientist Hansen there) in their "A Tale of Two Thermometers" article.

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- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Reply to
Don Klipstein

"How long must Earth cool before warming zealotry does?"

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-- Walter E. Williams

"The REAL inconvenient truth: Zealotry over global warming could damage our Earth far more than climate change"

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-- Nigel Lawson

Cheers! Rich

Reply to
Richard The Dreaded Libertaria

According to smoothed HadCRUT-3v, good enough for The Register's (not the one of Orange County) "A Tale of Two Thermometers" article, the world has cooled so far from a peak achieved in 2004.

The recent cooling spell appears to have bottomed out in January 2008, with the depth of the greatest La Nina in 20 years. The most recent center year of a 5 year period excluding that La Nina is 2004.

The warmest individual year since 1850 so far has been 1998, and second-warmest was 2005 (with smoothing over a few years being warmer then than in 1998). The world has cooled since 2005 for only 3 years.

The warming over the past few decades has previously included times of cooling. Notably the 1990-1993 stretch was entirely downward year-after-year, along with 1953-1956. Smoothed global temperature since

1953 has gone as long as about 4-5 years cooling after 1950 and before 1998.

Global HadCRUT-3v data text file, monthly and annual (annual for year-currently-in-progress is projected/forecast):

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Graph of global HadCRUT-3v, link obtained from the "A Tale of Two Thermometers" article:

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- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Reply to
Don Klipstein

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