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Son of Climategate! Scientist says feds manipulated data
Reporting points in coldest regions simply eliminated by U.S. agencies

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Posted: January 16, 2010
12:20 am Eastern


By Bob Unruh

In a one-two series of Climategate aftershocks that assuredly will
further rattle the global warming community, a report has been issued
by U.S. researchers accusing government agencies of cherry-picking
temperature readings used to assess global temperatures, and a series
of embarrassing e-mails were released revealing what happened when a
blogger dared to point out a mistake by NASA climate scientists.

The new report is from scientist Joseph D'Aleo and was highlighted in
a report on global warming on KUSI television in San Diego.

It comes only weeks after the tumultuous climategate e-mail scandal in
Britain erupted, proving top global warming scientists manipulated
data there.

The report from D'Aleo, a retired climatologist who has been skeptical
of global warming, contends climate data has been corrupted and skewed
by "urbanization and other local factors such as land-use-land-cover
changes and improper siting."

He blamed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which
he described as "seriously complicit in data manipulation and fraud."

The East Anglia e-mail leak focused on the work at the Climate
Research Unit there, but the director there has confirmed "almost all
the data" in the archive "is exactly the same as in the Global
Historical Climatology Network archive used by the NOAA National
Climatic Data Center," D'Aleo said.

But he noted that an analysis by San Jose computer programmer E.M.
Smith of the data "found they systematically eliminated 75 percent of
the world's stations with a clear bias towards removing higher
latitude, high altitude and rural locations."

"The thermometers in a sense marched towards the tropics, the sea and
to airport tarmacs," he said.

For example, the report said the number of reporting stations in
Canada dropped from 600 to 35 with the percentage of stations at lower
elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations
plummeted.

Further, a vast majority of the climate stations reporting in the U.S.
were either poorly or very poorly sited, taking temperature readings
from paved driveways, in a waste treatment facility, on rooftops or
near the exhaust from idling jet engines, rather than in open areas.

Stations in such locations as the Andes and Bolivia have virtually
vanished, meaning that temperatures for those areas now are
"determined by interpolation from stations hundreds of miles away on
the coast or in the Amazon."

"Think of it this way," D'Aleo told the television station, "if
Minneapolis and other northern cities suddenly disappeared but Kansas
City and St. Louis were still available, would you think an average of
Kansas City and St. Louis would provide an accurate replacement for
Minneapolis and expect to use that to determine how Minneapolis'
temperature has changed with any hope of accuracy?"

D'Aleo said that the coolest stations in a particular reporting period
sometimes disappeared in the next.

"This would indicate a deliberate attempt to create a warm bias on the
part of NOAA because in calculating the average temperatures in this
way it would ensure that the global average temperature for each month
and year would now show a positive temperature anomaly," the report
said.

Such anomalies, it added, make climate reports based on those figures
simply unreliable.

"You can trust in the data that shows there has been warming from 1979
to 1998, just as there was warming the around 1920 to 1940. But there
has been cooling from 1940 to the late 1970s and since 2001. It is the
long term trend on which this cyclical pattern is superimposed that is
exaggerated," the report said.

Meanwhile, Washington, D.C.-based government watchdog Judicial Watch
has released several hundred pages of e-mails from U.S. government
scientists reacting – sometimes with disdain and arrogance – when an
independent investigator pointed out an error in their global warming
statistics.

When the mistake ultimately was corrected, the tables reflected
slightly lower temperatures for years following 2000, and the
reshuffled rankings revealed that several years from the 1930s were,
in fact, warmer than during the last decade.

That, of course, undercut arguments that the life of modern man is
generating emissions that would, if left unchecked, eventually
threaten life on earth because of melting ice caps, rising seas and
climates too hot to support food production.

In the British scandal prior to Christmas, purloined e-mails from the
East Anglia Climate Research Unit, one of the world's premier global
warming investigative organizations, included references to a "trick"
to "hide the decline."


University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit


The NASA issue developed around 2007 when Canadian blogger Stephen
McIntyre exposed an error in NASA's handling of raw temperature data
from 2000-2006 at its Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The issue was that temperature readings apparently weren't handled in
a consistent fashion, leaving them open for challenge. Sometimes "raw"
data was used, while other times it was adjusted for "time of
observation."

The mistake noted by McIntyre prompted the government agency to "re-
process" data to eliminate an "artificial step" in the charts.

"Obviously, combining the uncorrected [data] with the [corrected]
records for earlier years caused jumps in the records at those
stations," a government e-mail responded. "The net effect averaged
over the U.S. was an error of about 0.15C or less in the post-2000
years."

However, 0.15 degrees Centigrade is one-third of a degree Fahrenheit,
which could be considered a significant change in an overall climate
average.

The e-mails show the impact was that while 1998 previously had a
deviation of 1.24 degrees Centrigrade, that should have been 1.23 –
bringing it below 1934. The lists for the highest deviations, the e-
mails show, had listed 1998, 1934, 2006, 1921, 1931, 1999, 1953, 2001,
1990 and 1938.

The new list was changed to: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953,
1990, 1938, 1939.

Instead of simply correcting the errors, however, government scientist
Jim Hansen responded by labeling McIntyre a "pest," and suggested that
those who disagree with global warming "should be ready to crawl under
a rock by now."

"This e-mail traffic ought to be embarrassing for NASA," said Tom
Fitton, chief of Judicial Watch, which obtained the documents under a
Freedom of Information Act request. "Given the recent Climategate
scandal, NASA has an obligation to be completely transparent with its
handling of temperature data."

"Instead of insulting those who point out their mistakes, NASA
scientists should engage the public in an open, professional and
honest matter," he said.

The hundreds of pages of documents concern what the government
described as a "glitch" in official assessments of temperatures.

Judicial Watch noted that a Bloomberg reporter had e-mailed to Hansen,
"The U.S. figures showed 1998 as the warmest year. Nevertheless, NASA
has indeed newly ranked 1934 as the warmest year…"

Hansen responded, "We have not changed ranking of warmest year in the
U.S. As you will see in our 2001 paper we found 1934 slightly warmer,
by an insignificant hair over 1998. We still find that result. The
flaw affected temperatures only after 2000, not 1998 and 1934."

To which NASA scientist Makiko Sato told Hansen, "I am sure I had 1998
warmer at least once on my own temperature web page..."

Fitton told WND the e-mails reveal at "unflattering portrait of NASA
scientists who, rather than deal forthrightly with their error,
attacked those who called them on it."

He said he would leave to scientific experts the exact analysis of the
impact of the flaw. But he said the dispute – and the government's
response – "calls into question other data that is being presented by
NASA [and others] in the global warming community."

"One has to wonder whether or not it would have been caught but for a
diligent researcher," he said. "These are not everyday scientists in
the private sector who can do whatever they want to do. These are
government scientists trashing citizens and bloggers."

He said the e-mails make it appear the government didn't even want to
engage in a discussion over the mistake – but for political, not
scientific reasons.

One of the newly revealed e-mails documents a government scientist
writing about those who were questioning the government's mistake:
"This seems to be a tempest inside somebody's teapot dome… It is
unclear why anyone would try to make something out of this, perhaps a
light not on upstairs? Or perhaps this is coming from one of the old
contrarians? They can't seem to get over the fact that the real world
has proven them to be full of malarkey! You would think that they
would be ready to crawl under a rock by now!"

McIntyre's website comment on the e-mail revelation today was that,
"If anyone is wondering whether e-mails by U.S. government employees
are 'private' and 'personal' – an assertion sometimes made in respect
to emails at CRU, an institution subject to UK FOI – the answer in
respect to NASA GISS appears to be no."

The previous e-mails from East Anglia, posted online after a hacker
found them, said, "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of
warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES
data published in the August (Bulletin of the American Meteorological
Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more
warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is
inadequate."

Suggestions to suppress information also were documented at East
Anglia, "Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re
(Assessment Report 4)? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the
moment – minor family crisis."

They also suggest how "warmists," as critics label those who believe
in global warming, conspired to squeeze dissenting scientists out of
the peer-review process.

Myron Ebell, of the GlobalWarming.org website where "cooler heads
prevail," had described the East Anglia e-mails as "shocking."

"It's kind of interesting to learn that petty politics seems to be
more prevalent in the scientific community than in the political
community," he said.

The documents, he said, "raise a huge number of questions about the
integrity of a lot of people in the alarmist community.

"What I've seen there is a very strong effort to manage the issue by
scientists and not as a scientific issue. It's very improper," he
said. "One of the criticisms is that we need scientists to be
scientists, and policy can be handled in public debate."

There also is an effort called the Petition Project which was launched
some 10 years ago when the first few thousand signatures were
gathered. The effort, assembled by Art Robinson, a research professor
of chemistry and cofounder of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science
and Medicine in 1973, now lists tens of thousands of qualified
scientists who endorse this:


There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of
carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will,
in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's
atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is
substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon
dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and
animal environments of the Earth.
WND also reported recently on the United Nation's summit in
Copenhagen, which failed to produce a global carbon emissions
agreement as advocates had sought.

That meeting, instead, was simply about American money, according to
Steve Stockman, a former Texas congressman who was in the Danish
capital for the two-week event before Christmas.

"It was about transferring the wealth of taxpayers," he said. "This
has nothing to do with science."

Further, a Colorado scientist described by the Washington Post as "the
World's Most Famous Hurricane Expert" said the East Anglia e-mails
"are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well-organized international
climate-warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the
last 25 years."

The comment came from Colorado State University's William Gray, whose
annual hurricane forecasts are the standard for weather
prognostications. His work pioneered the science of forecasting
hurricanes, and he has served as weather forecaster for the U.S. Air
Force. He is emeritus professor of atmospheric science at CSU and
heads the school's Department of Atmospheric Sciences Tropical
Meteorology Project.

He had forecast that U.S. researchers eventually would be caught by
their own e-mails, too.

"This conspiracy would become much more manifest if all the e-mails of
the publicly funded climate-research groups of the U.S. and of foreign
governments were ever made public," he said at the time.