[opendtv] Re: What does it take to convince

Lying to the ignorant seems to be a requirement to get ahead in Washington. 

• Figures don't lie, but liars figure. - Samuel Clemens (alias Mark Twain)
• There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. - Twain attributed this to B. Disraeli
• It has long recognized by public men of all kinds ... that statistics come under the head of lying, and that no lie is so false or inconclusive as that which is based on statistics. - H. Belloc
• If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment - Ernest Rutherford

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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-- 
Regards,
Mark A. Aitken
Director, Advanced Technology
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