[opendtv] Re: What does it take to convince
- From: "John Willkie" <johnwillkie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:29:55 -0800
ALL of the NASA errors discovered and reported so far are in the direction
of "reporting" hotter temperatures. In other words, these cannot be called
"errors" since errors would tend to be in both directions, and would be
somewhat evenly distributed in both directions.
(See also the "found ballots" and other "errors" that before the recount,
have added votes to Al Franken, with no errors accruing to the benefit of
Norm Coleman.)
NASA/Hansen have ZERO credibility on this. They should instead be
repurposed to trying to lower the "kill rate" of Space Shuttle missions,
something where they tend to kill employees and others.
A 3.8% (or so) catastrophic failure rate is significant, and not just to the
families of the dead.
NASA/Hansen are, simply, lying. At least, unlike Al Gore, they haven't
failed every science course they ever took, so they should know better.
Which is worse, apathy or ignorance? Lying to the ignorant would be worse.
John Willkie
-----Mensaje original-----
De: opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] En
nombre de John Shutt
Enviado el: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 1:12 PM
Para: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Asunto: [opendtv] Re: What does it take to convince
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610
.xml
The world has never seen such freezing heat
By Christopher Booker
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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