Since the AGW global warming hypothesis doesn’t fit the data, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has changed the data to fit the hypothesis. [Ed. note: The NCDC is now called NOAA]
After about 60 journal articles failed to explain the lack of warming over the past 18 years, NCDC now claims there was no pause in global warming; it was all a bookkeeping error.
Observational data from two satellite systems and balloon-borne radiosondes show no net global warming for at least the past 18 years even though atmospheric carbon dioxide content has been rising. The lack of warming is very inconvenient for government policy. Something had to be done.
Ignoring physical evidence and all the journal articles about the pause, the National Climate Data Center just published a paper (Karl et al “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus”) in Science Magazine which claims that the widely reported and accepted temperature hiatus is an illusion ‚Äì just an artifact of data analysis ‚Äì and that the global climate never really stopped warming.
This propaganda is probably designed to bolster the next round of UN-IPCC meetings in Paris in December where the IPCC will try to convince countries to spend billions of dollars fighting climate change and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
The claim is ironic because NCDC, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is deep into data manipulation itself. A new post from the NoTricksZone shows that “Comprehensive Analysis Reveals NOAA Wrongfully Applying ‘Master Algorithm’ To Whitewash Temperature History.” The author of that post says “I caught NOAA purposefully using computer code (algorithms) to lower historic temperatures to promote present day temperatures as the warmest on record.”
That’s not the first time. In my article “The past is getting cooler” I demonstrate that published government temperature records show the 1930s getting cooler and cooler with each update of the record. This phenomenon is due to government data manipulation designed to make the present look warmer in relation to the past.
Dr. S. Fred Singer has an American Thinker article on this latest gambit by NCDC. Singer notes that “There are at least two rival data centers that may dispute the NCDC analysis:
“The Hadley Centre in England and the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).In fact, Hadley’s partner, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, was the first to announce, on the BBC, the existence of a pause in global warming. Then there are also dozens of scientists who have published research papers, purporting to provide an explanation for the reported pause.”
NCDC is basing its claim on the surface temperature record which, itself, has many problems. Singer goes on to write, “Not only that, but a look at the detailed NCDC evidence shows that much depends on polar temperatures — which are mostly guessed at, for lack of good observations. If one uses the (truly global) satellite data, analyzed either by UAH or by RSS, the pause is still there, starting around 2003.” And, “the same satellite data show no warming trend from 1979 to 2000 ‚Äì ignoring, of course, the exceptional super-El-Nino year of 1998.”
A long post by Bob Tisdale and Anthony Watts demonstrates that all the claimed warming is due to NCDC manipulation of the data. In the same post, Dr. Judith Curry notes that NOAA use considerable gap filling of temperatures in the Arctic which ” introduces substantial error into their analysis.”
A separate article by Patrick J. Michaels, Richard S. Lindzen, and Paul C. Knappenberger notes that NOAA inappropriately adjusted ARGO buoy temperature data upwards:
“…the authors’ treatment of buoy sea-surface temperature (SST) data was guaranteed to create a warming trend. The data were adjusted upward by 0.12¬∞C to make them “homogeneous” with the longer-running temperature records taken from engine intake channels in marine vessels. As has been acknowledged by numerous scientists, the engine intake data are clearly contaminated by heat conduction from the structure, and as such, never intended for scientific use. On the other hand, environmental monitoring is the specific purpose of the buoys. Adjusting good data upward to match bad data seems questionable, and the fact that the buoy network becomes increasingly dense in the last two decades means that this adjustment must put a warming trend in the data.”
In a long technical post, Bob Tisdale shows that British Night Marine Air Temperature dataset which is used by NOAA,does not support NOAA’s claims of no slowdown in global surface warming.
Physicist Lubos Motl opines that “A whole discipline of pseudoscience ‚Äì one pretending to be science, like most pseudosciences ‚Äì has been created. It is the ‘climate change science’ whose preachers ‚Äì pretending to be scientists ‚Äì shout that the sky is falling. The ‘hiatus’ is an inconvenient truth for these ‘researchers’ so as of mid May 2015, they have proposed 63 explanations of the hiatus.” Motl then goes on to discuss how NCDC manipulated sea surface temperature data and provides a more general discussion of measuring and creating uncertainty in datasets.
Doug L. Hoffman at Resilient Earth also has a long post on problems with the NCDC paper. He concludes his post with this:
“According to Karl et al the pause was not, is not, real. It is only an artifact of decades of crappy temperature data, the same data that has fed the grossly inaccurate climate models that are at the heart of the global warming scam. And that’s the real bottom line—for this paper to be correct all the historical data, all the work of climate scientists around the world over the past 40-50 years, has been in error. If this paper is correct climate science has lost all credibility.”
We see that government “climate science” is nothing more than political science applied to support policy rather than have an honest assessment of conditions. Essentially, what Karl et al. have done is revise data to match a particular hypothesis. That’s your tax dollars at work. Are we paying for climate whores?
