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.

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.

-----------------

Hansen has tried this before and more than once.

NASA needs to fire his ass and get an actual scientist to take his
place.

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.

"JohnH" wrote in message
...
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.

Nobody political pushing it for profit.

I remember Chuck had his panties in a wad over the "disappearing arctic
ice". Hopefully he's now calmed down as the ice is now growing at the
fastest pace on record.

http://tinyurl.com/5e84e6