NASA’s James Hansen:
Pimping Climate Change on the Public Dime

Meet James Hansen

In America, and perhaps the world, the pre-eminent source for global weather information is NASA. Blessed with three or more temperature measuring satellites, NASA also collects data from NOAA and foreign sources to get a fix on global temperatures. This convergence of resources is unparalleled , and thus much of the world uses NASA’s continually-revised data and graphs to determine weather history and policy.

Which is unfortunate.

Particularly, because NASA simply cannot be trusted to provide scientifically unbiased information on this subject. When not demonstrating incomprehensible incompetence, NASA cooks the books.

Chef-in-chief is Dr. James Hansen.

James Hansen’s name should sound familiar. He is the fellow who has been screaming about global warming for over 20 years. He famously claimed that the Bush Administration was trying to silence him (huh?).

He is the detached scientists that went to Congress and testified that oil executives should be tried for crimes against humanity. (Wonder what penal statute that is?)

In real life, as opposed to the imaginary one occupied by the marvelous Dr James Hansen, the man is like an incompetent, unthinking, dogmatic, dolt: systematically reducing NASA to a high school-level science fair.

The latest, as reported by the Daily Tech:

Amateur team finds NASA error similar to one they discovered a year ago.

GISS’ most recent data release originally reported last October as being extraordinarily warm– a full 0.78C above normal. This would have made it the warmest October on record; a huge increase over the previous month’s data.

Those results set off alarm bells with Steve McIntyre and his gang of Baker Street irregulars at Climateaudit.org. They noted that NASA’s data didn’t agree at all with the satellite temperature record, which showed October to be very mild, continuing the same trend of slight cooling that has persisted since 1998. So they dug a little deeper.

McIntyre, the same man who found errors last year in GISS’s US temperature record, quickly noted that most of the temperature increase was coming from Russia. A chart of world temperatures showed that in October, most of Russia, the largest nation on Earth, was not only registering hot, but literally off the scale. Yet anecdotal reports were suggesting that worldwide, October was actually slightly colder than normal. Could there be another error in GISS’s data?

An alert reader on McIntyre’s blog revealed that there was a very large problem. Looking at the actual readings from individual stations in Russia showed a curious anomaly. The locations had all been assigned the exact temperatures from a month earlier– the much warmer month of September. Russia cools very rapidly in the fall months, so recycling the data from the earlier month had led to a massive temperature increase.”

[ABOVE: Russian October 2008]

I know what you are thinking. Anybody could have made the same mistake: using September data for October. And you might be right. Because the Wonder Boys and Girls at NASA do it all the time.

The really odd thing is: it is a one-way street.

Because such errors, inexplicably, always show the Earth warming.

Even if it isn’t.

The correction forced upon NASA last year was even more dramatic because it altered the entire Global Warming premise (although I am sure you have not heard a word about this in the media).

Going over the NASA historical weather graph, Steve McKintyre noticed some severe and unlikely high temperature spikes. He asked NASA for its mathematical model in an attempt to understand the same. A model is necessary because weather averages and means are based upon widely divergent observations, with sparse reporting on the high seas (thus satellites), Antarctica, and Africa.

NASA refused (of course).

McKintyre reverse engineered the model and discovered NASA had fallen victim to a Y2K bug. The result:

“NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding.

The warmest year on record is now 1934.

1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.

Revision of data at NASA is all too common.

It works like this: if the data does not support global warming, it is wrong. So it must be revised. From the Wall Street Journal:

For years, records from surface thermometers showed a global warming trend beginning in the late 1970s. But temperatures sensed by satellites and weather balloons displayed no concurrent warming. These records have been revised a number of times, and I examined the two major revisions of these three records…..There have been six major revisions in the warming figures in recent years, all in the same direction.

That direction would be to make the past colder thus making the current temperature appear warmer. Why have surface temperatures warmed? As Dr Alan Anthony Watts has long since proved, because of urbanization and the deterioration of locations of the thermometers. They are located in heat wells, near AC vents or at airports.Ridiculous. The background radiation should be measured in a grassy field of an acre or so, with instrumentation in a vented shad shed at least 4 feet off the ground.

Try to find that anymore.

As for NASA, you would think they would be pleased to have bloggers and casual observers correct their incompetence. Actually, we are kidding you there. Again from the Wall Street Journal:

So far this year NASA has issued at least five press releases that could be described as alarming on the pace of climate change. But the correction of its overestimate of global warming was merely posted on the agency’s Web site. James Hansen, NASA’s ubiquitous climate scientist and a man who has charged that the Bush Administration is censoring him on global warming, has been unapologetic about NASA’s screw up. He claims that global warming skeptics — “court jesters,” he calls them — are exploiting this incident to “confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change, thus delaying effective action to mitigate climate change.

So having been proved wrong, James Hansen, Weather Clown, insists that what was just disproved is still correct.

Wonderful science there.

Hansen recently made headlines when he travelled to London to testify on behalf of a group of environmentalists who had damaged a coal plant in protest against global warming. Hansen also serves as science advisor to Al Gore.

Hansen is a crank. And he should be fired He is a media whore whose boundless ignorance and prejudice have endangered the economic future of this nation and has destroyed the reputation of NASA.

[ABOVE: Hansen Measuring precipitation?]

by pat
images:
dequalss
vladnews
dvdinmypants
sources:
http://www.dailytech.com/Deja+Vu+All+Over+Again+Blogger+Again+Finds+Error+in+NASA+Climate+Data/article13410.htm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/correct_the_corrections_the_giss_urban_adjustment/
http://www.dailytech.com/Blogger+Finds+Y2K+Bug+in+NASA+Climate+Data/article8383.htm
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118835472067611877.html?mod=most_emailed_day