Allegations Surface Regarding NASA Climate Data Manipulation

Amateurs playing "gotcha" with professionals. Here we go again. What other profession must put up with this BS? Think of the time wasted answering these things, trying to respond fast enough to get ahead of "fairly unbalanced" Fox News?

I'm shocked!!! What makes anyone think that government agencies are any different than others that manipulate data in order to continue funding?

So there's still at least one person besides Hansen who is still pretending to believe that anthropocentric global warming is the successor to Sagan's "nuclear winter" hoax. (To be fair, Hansen may actually believe it. What can we expect from NASA when a nut case like Hansen can become director of a NASA center?)

NOTE: Article Biased. Contains many codewords indicating a bias, at least, and should not be taken as straight truth. This is a TV station reporter with unknown credentials.

Why is Hansen still working at NASA? Altering data to fit your agenda should be reason to get any so called scientist fired. Even a government scientist. I won't trust any computer models or theory's coming from NASA as long as Hansen is employed.

On a side note, I saw a funny picture of many manatees gathered around the hot water coming from a nuclear power plant to keep warm in the freezing temperatures in Florida last week. How ironic is it that the so called cause of man made global warming was probably saving the lives of endangered manatees.
Next time someone shows me a picture of a polar bear clinging to a piece of melting ice I will laugh my @ss off.

FYI, antropogenic != anthropocentric

Curious. Surely you trust biologists, doctors, astronomers, and engineers to tell you the facts as they know them; but somehow everyone who pursues earth science is lying conspiring scum, lower than politicians. Hansen's self interest includes getting more funding, but it hinges on maintaining his reputation among peers for getting the science right. By contrast, Sen. Jim Inhofe's self-interest hinges on getting people energized on a topic and positioning himself as the solution. Inhofe doesn't get votes depending on his reputation for scientific accuracy; rather, this hoax story has won Inhofe millions of ardent fans, and it didn't even have to be accurate or well-documented. Comparing the two, how could you end up more suspicious of Hansen's motives than Inhofe's? Now look at all your other "sources". What's their self-interest from manufacturing controversy?

Do you actually know any working scientists, know their temperament? I work elsewhere in the NASA scientific community, and if there were such a fetid swamp of conspiracy in Earth science, I'd have heard about it. I'm not saying NASA politics are sweet-smelling; just that the bad smell hangs around mostly around mundane things like procurement decisions and management "slippage", not scientific integrity.

Have you ever really considered how implausible such a conspiracy would be? Come on...

Manatees always hang around electrical powerplant hot-water outflow in winter-- or at least they have for the thirty-odd years I've had family in Florida. That's nothing new. (I recommend Crystal River for winter manatee-watching, by the way).

"Next time someone shows me a picture of a polar bear clinging to a piece of melting ice I will laugh my @ss off."
Polar bear populations already show a marked decline.

• At the most recent meeting of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group(Copenhagen, 2009), scientists reported that of the 19 subpopulations of polar bears, eight are declining, three are stable, one is increasing, and seven have insufficient data on which to base a decision

Do you ever reexamine your assumptions in light of new data? Or do you feel better sticking with what you learned in kindergarten?

Hi Papa, I'll ignore the personal attack. I did some digging and came up with some polar bear info for you.

The following is testimony to the US Senate that was suppressed for being too inconvenient.

"Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined."

Maybe you should "reexamine your assumptions".

I found some info on the famous melting polar bear photo too.
"The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image."

Save a manatee build a power plant!

Being serious for a minute, I found another well written article on climategate. The title is "How To Hide The Sun" Would love to hear your comments on it. http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/climategate_how_to_hide_the_su.html

Last time I checked, the average of the averages of subsets of the data points is equal to the average of the individual data points. I do not know if NCDC and others are using weighting of the global points' underlying readings and average values (likely). That would change the results if not handled correctly, but even this can be accounted for mathematically. If they gave it to a mathematician or statistician to develop the proper underlying math the results today are as accurate as anything before and the overall average can be compared to past data.

The KUSI-TV announcement looks highly questionable in tone and technical content. I suspect someone is out to get ratings at the expense of NASA and unbiased, truthful reporting. It must be ratings time again.

Having said all of that, IF the data was deliberately manipulated improperly to fit a preconceived notion then those involved should be fired and shunned by the scientific community. If we instead have endless debates over using N instead of N-1 in a statistical analysis where N=6000 then there is nothing here except some potentially interesting scholarly debate over minutia.

"The following is testimony to the US Senate that was suppressed for being too inconvenient."

Hey, well, I gotta change my mind now, since you say it that way. Perhaps it was suppressed because it was not deemed credible, or submitted late on a Friday.

From the PBI website:

• The Western Hudson Bay population has dropped by 22% since 1987. The Southern Beaufort Sea bears are showing the same signs of stress the Western Hudson Bay bears did before they crashed, including smaller adults and fewer yearling bears.

The other link you provided is interesting. I was thinking I should go see for myself how the stolen emails are being quoted out of context and misinterpreted, and here it is!!
(1) The presence of an 11-year signature is noted, but the magnitude is not given; so it's detectable but of unknown significance. (0 points.)
(2) Wigley never said in that quoted passage that "the main cause of climate change [is] "solar forcing'", as Wright paraphrased. Wigley said the "main external candidate" is solar (i.e. the most significant of all the other possible factors besides atmospheric chemistry), and the response to solar forcing deserves further study. Wright changed the meaning when he attempted to paraphrase it. ( -1 point to Wright.)
(3) The long Rutherford quote was a completely banal discussion of analysis methods for their first look. He specifically avoided 2 pitfalls I would have been concerned about. What's not to like here? (0 points.)
(4) The Mafia quip is just a bad joke reflecting frustration with the opposition from S&B. (1 point to Wright for recognizing bad taste.)

The group (or gang, as Wright preferred to call them) was apparently cranky about having to respond again to Soon and Baliunas. They were evidently in agreement on what they didn't like about the S&B analysis and working out how they were going to collaborate on a rebuttal. But I don't see any conspiracy, just planning and collaborating.

So no, I don't find this heavily slanted article to be a convincing critique of the science. Just another amateur playing "gotcha," and not very well.

Global warming proponents have hung their hat on the fact that the climate will change. Unfortunately they have to prove its changing in abnormal ways.
Disbelievers are trying to say nothing changes... which is an equally flawed and supportable viewpoint when earths climate has been doing something abnormal almost every day of the week for the last few billion years.

Our environmental problems are much broader than a few ppm of carbon in the air. Using a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" response when criticized is not going to help people understand the situation.

Jeez, what a non-story. Smith and D'Aleo are either ignorant and incompetent or peddlers of disinformation.

In order to produce a useful climate record you have to remove the non-climatic influences that crop up when a station moves, the time of observation changes, etc. If you don't remove these things you get spurious trends that have nothing to do with climate. The classic example in the U.S. is the apparent drop in temperatures after WWII when reporting stations were moved from downtown locations to rural airports. There are very well-known, simple, straightforward, standard statistical procedures that are used to remove these non-climatic biases.

These procedures are widely published in the literature and textbooks. Anyone who has ever done any historical climate reconstructions is aware of them. The real story here is why aren't journalists doing journalism and investigating these outlandish claims. A future story is why, after demonstrating that he is either incompetent or a liar and proving that he has no credibility, would any news organization or reporter rely on D'Aleo as a source?

It's basically rewarmed trash, stuff that the professionals have known and dealt with for fifty years filtered through a haze of political posturing.

You have to start with the knowledge that weather stations were not set up and run to provide climate data. Throughout the years the equipment has changed, the time of day when the readings were taken has changed, the sites have moved, the areas around the stations have changed. The "raw data" fetish simply gets you nonsense. In order to deal with this all you need to know what happened and a consistent way of handling it. NOAA does that for the US.

Here is a simple example, if you read the red herring from Joe D'Aleo one of the heavy breathing sections deals with the station at Darwin Australia which had been lifted from a character by the name of Willis Eschenbach, well known for manipulating graphs. Eschenbach's take on Darwin was idiocy. There are references to primary literature at the link.

Sorry you guys got taken again. Learn caution when dealing with these clowns, they carry whoopee cushions.

The underlying purpose of the "Global Warming" scare and fear mongering, if you have not figured it out already, is to restrict, in a friendly and undeniable way, the friendly Arabic nations, especially Saudi Arabia, from raising their oil prices.

You can connect the dots for yourself when you research the extremely negative reaction the Saudi Arabian leadership exhibits every time "Global Warming" proponents gain ground by publishing government-backed technical reports by distinguished, dedicated, and credible people with extensive credentials.

Did you ever notice the timing of these reports coincident with rising oil prices tailing off? (…Yes)

Or rather, have you ever seen a spike in oil prices after such reports were published? (…No)

As long as Saudi Arabia has oil to sell to oil consumers who pout about Global Warming, Global Warming issues serve a very useful purpose for these oil consumers.

The underlying purpose of the Global Warming "scare and fear mongering" is to explain the scientific results and get you to understand their far-reaching implications. The purpose of the naysayer propaganda campaign is to stymie progress toward a more sustainable energy economy and continue to prop up US economic dominance under the old world order.

It is ridiculous and laughable to suggest that thousands of scientists, in a multi-national community with multi-national financial support, are conspiring to support any political objective of the American government, across a half-dozen US Presidents from both parties. How can you even say that with a straight face?

David44149, as you guessed all the temperature anomaly reconstructions are area weighted, usually on a 5 degree by 5 degree grid.

The algorithms used to do this differ between the various reconstructions, NOAA, GISSTEMP, HadCRUT, UAH, RSS, etc. (ETC is the most accurate) but the trends in the reconstructions are consistent with each other while there are offsets because of choices of reference period, etc. The trend is the thing that these records give you and they agree within the expected precision

The Goddard FOIA library has posted electronically the documents that have been released to date. They give a fuller picture and more context than these articles provide.

Papa couldn't do a better job of reciting the NASA party line if he were reading from a script. Perhaps he is!
I happen to be a "working scientist" myself. When I was a student, I wouldn't have believed that something like SDI could be riddled with out-and-out fraud. Then I went to work on SDI myself, and quickly learned that it wasn't just riddled with fraud, it was mostly fraudulent. That was just the beginning of my education in the ways of the world.
As for anthropogenic global warming...the fact that carbon dioxide generated by the burning of fossil fuels makes no detectable, much less significant, contribution to the greenhouse effect is no more debatable than is the shape of the Earth. (I really, really hate to agree with Rush Limbaugh on anything...but even Limbaugh is right occasionally, if only by accident.) Yes, AGW is a hoax, just as nuclear winter was a hoax (although on a much smaller scale). Nuclear winter is forgotten; soon AGW will be forgotten too. If Papa really believes what he says...a big if...then he must be too ignorant of the history of science to know that there have been many such hoaxes, and some of them have been very big indeed. Has he ever heard of Hans Hoerbiger, or of Trofim Lysenko?

Well Conley, it's like this. One of the driving forces behind climate denial is the George Marshall Institute. Curiously they were also among the driving forces behind SDI, and in fact, the Institute was set up by Fred Seitz, William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow to sponsor SDI funding and development, and just somehow they virulently opposed taking action on CFCs, climate change and a host of other things ranging out to environmental tobacco smoke.

So you are accusing those who recognize the dangers of climate change due to fossil fuel burning because those who oppose limits were committing fraud. Ever think you are pointing in the wrong direction?

And yes, excess carbon dioxide (about 100 ppm in the current 280 ppm) from burning fossil fuels does make a difference. About 3 C per doubling (2-4.5 is the range). Educate yourself

Yet another ignoramus. Carbon dioxide accounts for about 3% of the greenhouse effect, and the burning of fossil fuels accounts for about 3% of the input of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. These are facts. Anyone who denies them is either ignorant or a liar (or both, if he's a politician).

Wow -- Conley is amazing. He is clueless about atmospheric and climate science, yet ready to jump in and accuse others of ignorance. Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere. Water vapor, which is highly variable, provides positive feedback and reinforces the carbon dioxide heat trapping. Carbon dioxide has increased by 40% since we began large scale burning of fossil fuels. There is no way to account for this increase from non-anthropogenic effects. And there are no other climate forcing functions, positive or negative, as large as this change in atmospheric carbon dioxide. No one with any scientific training in this field can doubt these basic facts, even though there are plenty of disagreements about future rates of heating. And Conley, if you do not accept the reality of the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect, do you also think that Venus has a nice temperate climate, maybe with dinosaurs running around on the surface?

This gets fall down laughing. Turns out that the FOIA request came from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Emails were posted on the GSFC FOIA library web page in mid-December. There was nothing there other than the folks at GISS responding properly, the CEI did nothing, no press release, no heavy breathing. They had been making a lot of noise about the FOIA request earlier.

Along comes Judicial Watch, probably spots the Email files, grabs them and claims credit for uncovering a scandal. Problem is that even the three letters they dug out if your read them show that James Hanson and everyone else at GISS behaved properly.

NASA Watch, Space Ref and a whole lot of other folk got punked.

There is a limit to the time I will waste bandying words with ignoramuses and liars on a given thread. I've reached my limit on this thread. You ignoramuses and liars can believe, or pretend to believe, whatever you like.

Hi Papa, not sure if you are still reading this but I found another good video. It is broken into 5 segments, the one you should watch is segment #4 explaining how the climate models have been altered and the higher altitude temperature station have all been removed from the models. Not what I would call science but more like a war on science.
http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/81583352.html