On Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:36:51 GMT, Tom Francis - SWSports
wrote:

Get it? Cooking - Global Warming?

Um...

Anyway...


The world has never seen such freezing heat

By Christopher Booker

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 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.
snipped

I am absolutely astonished that none of this has been reported on NBC, CBS,
ABC, the Washington Post, or the NY Times. I suppose the LA Times must have
extensively covered it. Oh, Britain's "Telegraph" carried the article.

http://tinyurl.com/6ym4qg

Anyway, thanks for posting it.
--
John H.