NASA manipulated Global Warming data (The Register article)

Great Debates
1

A Tale of Two Thermometers

The Register, a popular online daily newspaper that specializes in ordinary tech news with a dash of extraordinary investigative reporting, ran an article today about how NASA’s current data on global warming is both out of sync with the world’s and its own data from a decade ago. The article essentially accuses NASA (and the guy in charge, Al Gore’s science advisor and one of the biggest advocates of global warming) of fudging the numbers just to prove a point

Here’s a plot of the difference between NASA’s data for U.S. temperatures 1880-2000 published in 1999 and 2007:

The majority of years pre-1970 had their temperature adjusted downward, and virtually all the years post 1970 had their temps drastically boosted.

Now, I think all this debate about whether global warming has already happened to be retarded. There’s no debate that it will, so why drive discussion into this troublesome area of whether it has? But then use data manipulation, not just dogma, to win that self-created fight? I guess when you’re ‘saving the planet’, truth is the cheapest collateral.

Of course, it’s not the first time NASA manipulated data on a massive scale to prove its own point. Did you know Mars isn’t actually red?

Sigh. The world we live in…

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+1, as they say.

This is the kind of article that I dont’ see how an honest AGW proponent can get away with defending their views after reading.

3

That particular article reeks of agenda and confirmation bias.

I’m not saying NASA is right, either, but I’m not willing to accept the article as fact offhand, and neither should you. I know the urge to accept whatever evidence fits your world view is strong, but even the OP realizes that even if the article is 100% accurate and not misleading at all, it still isn’t enough to deny global warming on its own.

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Wow. As I’ve often said, no discipline is free from politics and corruption — including science.

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So pointing out that NASA has obviously changed the data for no apparent scientific reason is confirmation bias?

I’m willing to accept what the article says about NASA changing data because, first of all, it’s not the only place I’ve seen that happen. Is there something wrong with the charts themselves? Is on of the charts being compared fake or something?

Or maybe there is some other fact in the article under question. Obviously the speculation of *why * the data would be changed isn’t fact, but it’s not presented as such.

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As if it was hard…

Admitting that one source is Climate Audit and remembering that Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre has been found to be less than reliable in his points is enough for me to dismiss the article, but there is something else.

I did notice the difference in temperature before, interestingly I thought it was a bigger problem for other groups to explain because of the quality control issue. NASA did declare slightly higher temperatures than Had-Crut and others recently, because I remembered that NASA has been politically pressured to minimize the problem, I still think their results are more reliable than others.

Investigating before I also found that a few years ago that NASA also began to collect data and process the data with quality control, until you can point to me that Had-Crut and others are following those quality controls I will give the advantage to NASA up to a point.

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I don’t see the article as confirmation bias but more as a poisoning the well act, As it is, I still have to see direct evidence that a human changed the data on purpose when it is more likely that the way the data was collected and the measuring instruments are the reason for the difference.

The innuendo (there is no evidence really for it so far) in the article is bullshit.

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It isn’t just the article. It’s the articles linked from the article. And whether it’s intentional or just incompetent doesn’t make that much difference. In accounting, there’s a maxim that you must not only be above reproach in all your dealings, you must appear to be above reproach. When you’re manipulating numbers for people to use in making decisions, you need to be both honest and careful.

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And I did make a note of that.

I goes both ways, you are excluding the very strong possibility that the others are the ones making the mistake (notice that you are ignoring that NASA can be correct, not “intentional or incompetent”), when I consider the resources and quality control available at NASA I have to demand that the other groups show if they did follow the procedure.

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Okay folks, repeat after me: “Don’t believe everything you read!” I can’t comment on all aspects of that article and no doubt a more complete debunking will come in time, but here are just a few of the problems that I was able to notice:

(1) The Hadcrut data of annual global temperature seems to include an entry for 2008, which is a bit problematical given that this includes the future. How they got the 2008 data point, heaven knows, but it is extremely likely that the full year will average out significantly warmer than the first few months.

(2) All those plots are shown on different scales that makes them very difficult to compare. Furthermore, the choice of start point for the satellite data sets of 1998 is an excellent one to choose if you want to make it look like it was warm at the beginning of the record because 1998 was head-and-shoulders above any previous year, as is clear from the other data sets. A good discussion of that is here.

(3) The author seems to confuse NOAA and NASA, which are two very different agencies. Hansen is part of NASA, the people who control the actual USHCN data set are NOAA (notice the little NOAA insignia on the graph). The article is so garbled at this point that I have no clue who is responsible for adjustments made to it. (I.e., does NOAA make the adjustments and NASA use it, or does NASA take the NOAA data set and make adjustments or further adjustments?)

(4) The odds argument is nonsensical unless one knows the reasons for the adjustments. The argument assumes that each data point is adjusted randomly but if they are adjusted for some systematic correction then it is not correct. I don’t see any reason why they would be adjusted randomly.

(5) Calling Hansen “Al Gore’s science advisor” makes it sound like this is some sort of official position. Hansen is certainly one of the scientists who Al Gore has relied on but I know of no official capacity in which he has served as Al Gore’s science advisor.

(6) The statement that “Both of the satellite data sources, as well as Had-Crut, show worldwide temperatures falling below the IPCC estimates” is incorrect in any meaningful sense as a paper last year in Science showed. By meaningful, I mean a smoothed global temperature (as the IPCC predictions were never meant to capture the jumps up and down on short time scales).

(7) The sentence “We saw a global cooling scare in 1924, a global warming scare in 1933, another global cooling in the early 1970s, and another warming scare today” repeats…or at least implies… the myth that there was any sort of scientific consensus…or even a majority of the peer-reviewed literature predicting global cooling in the 70s (although the leaving out of the word “scare” in that one case may be the author’s attempt to shield himself from being called on this…since he does reference the “RealClimate” blog in his article, he is likely aware of the link I gave).

(8) The sources he references, Anthony Watts and ClimateAudit are both well-known skeptic websites, which makes it quite clear where he is getting his information from. (Watts in particular has done a lot of junk analysis that he has been called on by this blogger.)

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Yes, right you are jshore, I also did notice many of those misleading items, but I have no time right now.

Just seeing that the author fell for the myth of the global cooling scares was enough for me to go :rolleyes: .

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This is the point I was talking about. We are given two different charts for the same data set, but the newer chart says that the data is now different than it was in 1999. Is there a point of fact I’m missing here?

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The paper is available here [PDF file].

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As mentioned I have no time right now, but IIRC this is old or similar to what I remember, There was a discrepancy with satellite temperatures that was making the results cooler than expected, but they did found evidence that the satellites missed some items, when it was corrected it was found that the temperatures matched the actual readings from the field. Recently the deniers got NASA to do a slight correction to a global chart, if evidence can be produced that NASA is wrong I see no problem in making changes, OTOH, NASA also can and does correct the charts when there is evidence that some parameters were missed in the past.

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Here is a post that puts all the three different global surface temperature data sets on the same graph so one can look at how well they do or do not correspond over different time periods.

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For one thing there is a debate over whether it will happen, from the same people who say it hasn’t.

And another point; I’ve been reading for years about glaciers and permafrost melting, including some that’s been frozen for many thousands of years. If there isn’t any net global increase in temperature, that means some other places are getting colder; where are they, and why ? Scientifically interesting, if nothing else, not that I buy that that’s what’s actually happening.

And finally, since when has NASA been the sole reason to believe that global warming is occurring ?

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I sort of agree with Der Trihs. This incident is a reflection on NASA, not on climate change. For me, it’s on a par with the English-Metric thing they did when the Mars ship was lost. (Assuming incompetence or carelessness over deliberate fudging.)

18

I too think it’s more the carelessness aspect. My question is then why should I trust AGW predictability if this kind of carelessness is part of the equation?

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In one agency. And that assuming the claims the story makes are true.

What’s your alternative, to hide under a bed ? Anything of worldwide importance is going to involve so many agencies and institutes and governments and individuals that SOME of them are going to screw up, or lie, or whatever. If you are actually consistent about it, refusing to believe such a problem exists if one agency screws up amounts to refusing to believe in anything worldwide at all, since someone always will screw up.

Global warming isn’t some idea just coming out of NASA, or supported only by data coming out of NASA. If it was, then yes, proof that NASA screwed up or falsified data would be a major blow to claims that the world is getting warmer. But NASA isn’t the only source, so it’s not.

20

You can tap dance all you like, but Hansen’s group either made the adjustment or they didn’t. If they did make the adjustment, they have some serious explaining to do. The fact is that Hansen has staked his professional reputation on global warming. Has that colored his judgment? It looks like it, but I would be interested to read his response to these charges.

Assuming that Hansen is cooking the books, that alone does not disprove the CAGW hypothesis. But it does make the BS meter rise another notch. As if it weren’t high enough already.