Curses! Foiled again:
Cold, Hard Facts
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, November 17, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: Despite record snows and low temperatures around the world last month, a major Al Gore supporter says October was the hottest on record. The only thing being cooked here is not the Earth, but the books.
James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and global warming alarmist, is Al Gore’s favorite scientist, part of that mythical global warming “consensus” that says we are doomed and man is the culprit. On Nov. 10 he announced that last month was the hottest October on record and we were still doomed.
Dr. Hansen has not only become global warming’s Robin to Al Gore’s Batman, he has also been a critic of the “deniers,” those who dare to insist that the debate is far from over, and that the computer models used can’t even predict the past, much less the future.
Hansen has said in the past that “heads of major fossil-fuel companies who spread disinformation about global warming should be ‘tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.’ ” They pay for self-serving studies, and any scientist who disagrees with Gore is obviously on the take.
Christopher Booker, writing in the U.K. Telegraph, reports that Hansen apparently has been spreading disinformation all his own to come up with a conclusion that flies in the face of empirical evidence we can see with our own eyes.
Hansen’s claim of the hottest October ever came after reports of unseasonal snow and record low temperatures.
China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever.”
The Swiss lowlands last month got the most snow for any October since records began.
Zurich received 20 centimeters, breaking the record of 14 cm set in 1939. Ocala, Fla., experienced the second-lowest temperature recorded for October since 1850.
Elsewhere in the U.S., 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 how did Hansen claim it was the warmest?
Booker writes: “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.”
As Booker reports, the glaring error was picked up by two intrepid climate bloggers — U.S. meteorologist Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That and Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit.
McIntyre is the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the infamous “hockey stick” graph that purported to show Earth’s temperature as stable until man started building SUVs, causing a sharp upward spike.
Caught with its pants down, the Goddard Institute started juggling its books. To compensate for the carrying over of the bogus temperature readings, it claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic — in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice 30% more extensive than at the same time last year. Ooops.
If Dr. Hansen thinks oil company executives should be tried for crimes against humanity for being skeptical about global warming claims and seeking the truth, what should the penalty be for him and his ilk? He is yelling fire in a crowded planet.
The Goddard now says it got the data from another body and didn’t have the resources to verify the data. In the computer world, there’s a phrase for this — garbage in, garbage out. The institute’s figures are one of four data sets used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to come up with its doomsday scenarios.
We took a little, er, heat recently when we wrote that major agencies tracking earth’s temperature (including the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the Christy group at the University of Alabama and Remote Sensing Systems Inc. in California) had reported “the earth cooled 0.7C in 2007, the fastest decline in the age of instrumentation, putting us back to where the earth was in 1930.”
Others, we were told, were claiming it wasn’t so. They’d better check their numbers.
Dr. Hansen remains 60 Minutes’ (Oh, how they love to show the anecdotal footage of icebergs dramatically breaking off and falling into the ocean!) favorite “go to” guy on climate change the way Tyler Drumheller is their favorite “CIA expert”.
A client of mine yesterday said the Today Show is doing a special on climate change, with reporters at 4 corners around the globe. I wonder if they chose to report on this?
A former fetus, the “wordsmith from nantucket” was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1968. Adopted at birth, wordsmith grew up a military brat. He achieved his B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (graduating in the top 97% of his class), where he also competed rings for the UCLA mens gymnastics team. The events of 9/11 woke him from his political slumber and malaise. Currently a personal trainer and gymnastics coach.
The wordsmith has never been to Nantucket.