NASA scientist admits 'blunder' over declaring 'hottest October on record'...

[Psephos]

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.
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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.

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Full opinion article here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml

[BrklynLiberal]

1. ....

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming.

[gristy]

2. This PROVES global warming is the biggest fraud perpetrated on the American public since, since...

um.... Isn't it?

[mn9driver]

3. This editorial is nonsense

The GISS figures were pulled and corrected less than 24 hours after they were released, and GISS never announced that October was the "warmest on record". This kind of hysteria over a minor, transient and inconsequential glitch is typical of the Denial folks.

If anyone wants to read what some ACTUAL climate scientists have to say about this glitch and the breathless conspiratorial hysteria of the Denial crowd, go here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/mountains-and-molehills/#more-620

[Psephos]

4. Not nonsense, as much as a biased point of view

Clearly, the most strident people on both sides of the issue tend to minimize or omit anything that doesn't buttress their arguments.

It's hard to find sources on this issue that aren't prejudiced, either for or against...a strong indicator that the science is still formative. No one argues or calls others names over what time the sun will rise tomorrow. As Bertrand Russell observed, "The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no conclusive evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic."

Meanwhile - very good link. Thanks!

[Igel]

15. The problem is that they were released.

Had they shown exceptional cooling for that month, I'd expect the researchers to have examined them more closely. What meets predictions and expectations isn't scrutinized with the same intensity as what challenges predictions and expectations. It's called confirmation bias.

The deniers have their own confirmation bias. One's own bias always seems reasonable; the opponents' bias always seems like insane hysteria. Critical thinking is a great tool to undermine one's own bias; it's not for speaking truth to power--that's a corruption of it--but for interrogating something that purports to be the truth and asking if it really *is* the truth.

Those who first started ranting about the cock up didn't mention a GISS press release. They mentioned Hansen personally. The purported GISS press release came later, an accretion on the original story that needed no evidence beyond citing a previous story and adding an inference.

[mn9driver]

18. Your response is quite reasonable

The editorial that I responded to is not.

It seems that your position is that the sharing and posting of data is bad, but this is precisely how errors are detected and corrected in the scientific community. I will repeat what I posted earlier, since it seems that it got missed:

GISS did not post any "conclusions" with this data. None. Zero. All GISS did was post the data and note that it represented a large anomaly.

Other scientists looked at the data and found the error, which is EXACTLY THE WAY IT IS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN. This is exactly how the scientific community works, and what the peer review process is all about.

Propagandists are not scientists. This editorial is propaganda, not "peer review", or anything else that even faintly resembles science.

[Recursion]

5. 1998 will probably be the warmest year on record for decades

Variance is a bitch, so is ergodicity. People who don't understand both of those should stop pretending they are scientists...

[Psephos]

6. Good points there

Recognizing ergodicity does not come naturally to those who haven't studied stats; thermodynamic subtleties are elusive to those without a mathematical grasp of physics, and nonlinear systems' tendency to swing between two metastable regimes makes little sense to those who haven't studied them in a variety of contexts.

Yet they all figure importantly in being able to see the pony that's in there, somewhere.

[Recursion]

8. But this one actually can give us some confidence

Those temperatures are probably not normally-distributed; they seem tail-heavy. But whether Pareto or some other distribution is a better model, a detector with a pretty low Pf rate would almost certainly find a rising mean signal in that (and if our model allows a rising mean to begin with, we've already thrown ergodicity out the window). Tail-heavy noise is especially hard on detectors, but a linear rising H1 for the past two decades or so is, really, the way to go here.

Note also that if we do go into a deep recession over the next year or so, we would expect a dip in the signal like we have in the recessions of the early 1980's and early 1990's.

[kurt_cagle]

7. Long Term Cooling Trend Underway

I believe that there is in fact a broad human induced warming of the Earth. However, I also believe that for at least the next sixty years or so, there will also be a natural cooling trend due to natural variations in magnetic field interactions between the Sun, the Earth and Jupiter, and not coincidentally this year corresponded to an unusually long dormant phase for sunspots (which are the visible manifestations of these magnetic interactions).

What this means is that we may be looking at a situation where in the immediate term, temperatures moderate and even start to move towards significantly cooler temperatures (especially in the North Atlantic phasing regions of the US, Canada and Northern and Western Europe); this year may be an indication of this.

Of course, I think this is bad for a number of reasons. When the next cycles shift back towards a warming trend, that warming trend will be starting from a base several degrees higher than where it is right now. This also may not necessarily impact the polar ice regions much at all, nor necessarily even affect glaciation, which means that the problems that we're going to face with the loss of the glaciers (and consequently fresh watersheds) may not necessarily be solved even if the temperatures drop.

[tom_paine]

9. That would be nice if that were the case, and I hope you are correct, but everything I have read

suggests that the effects you speak of are simply overwhelmed by the scope and intensity of increasing CO2 emissions, themselves briefly retarded in their rise (but not likely to decrease significantly) by the coming economic slowdown/recession/depression/whatever.

Like a single match held up 20 feet away from a 10,000 W lighthouse bulb, the effects you speak of will likely be "drowned out" by the more intense source of change.

But if I read you correctly, you only see this as a downward blip, shall we say, in an upward trend.

It is certainly possible, and worldwide decreased economic activity for a few years will help this, sad as it will be for so many.

Ultimately the question between us is the relative intensity of anthropogenic GW vs. the GC effects you say are coming from changes in the magnetosphere.

Buckle up. Gonna be a helluva ride one way or the other...

[Uncle Joe]

16. Global Warming is so strong, the Earth is heating up in spite of Global Dimming

which actually has a cooling effect. For a few days after 9/11, when all the planes were grounded temperatures spiked because the sky cleared from lack of jet trails and exhaust.

So as severe as global warming climate change seems now, it's worst effects are actually being masked, but global warming is still winning out over the effects of global dimming.

[desktop]

10. Are you a Oil industry worker or just an Al Gore hater

The author of this article is a known global warming denier who is busy here getting the public incited so they will go out and buy his book. Which of course goes into detail attacking Al Gore and promoting the idea that global warming is a myth. Cherry picking data to make Senator Inhofe look like nothing more than the creationist moron he is, is a disservice to all intelligent people in this world. When practically every glacier on the planet, the arctic, the Antarctic, and Greenland are melting, it's a shame we have a DU poster doing the work of the rightwing global waring deniers. Exxon Mobil couldn't have said it any better.

[Psephos]

11. Actually, I'm interested in posting and discussing what those who oppose AGW are saying

Why did you make such aggressive accusations? Insults are not convincing arguments, and are death to meaningful discussion. The science speaks for itself. I posted this so that people here would be aware of the general conversation, and prepared to answer it.

I find the science very convincing that we are experiencing anthropogenic effects on climate. Go find a denier to pick on, if that's really your bag.

"The central problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."
Bertrand Russell

[desktop]

12. You post a story with no comment that you disagree with it

If you disagree with the story, you should state that in your posting, otherwise people assume you agree with the story. As for insults, I'm not the one calling people fools. Good luck with that.

[Psephos]

14. I never comment when posting articles

Post your own stuff, exactly as you see fit.

As for the line from Russell, it wasn't intended for you, but now that I think about it... ;-)

[Po_d Mainiac]

13. There are other signs

That something is happening. I live in Central Maine. My dog has been getting ravaged by wood ticks for the last 3 weeks. After a bit of research this indicates an odd condition exists. According to the University of Maine, and other "experts" the area these ticks have infested is about 80 miles North of their historic range. Those same reports state that August is the peak month of activity.

We have also experienced three 25yr rain events in the last seven months, and ten 25yr rain events over the last three years as defined by NOAA and USGS.

These two "personal experience" examples are far from conclusive, but since Mother Nature does not pass information via a "Blackberry" I'll take it as her way of communicating.

[4lbs]

17. All I know is that here in San Diego, CA, it's a third straight 90+ degree day in mid-November.

I can't recall it ever being this hot this late in the year, in the 35 years I've lived in this area.