By Now the climate fraud that was first uncovered with the ClimateGate scandal that led to discoveries of manipulated data in New Zealand and Australia has now spread to the US with both NOAA and NASA being caught manipulating temperature data as well:
Smith has done much of the heavy lifting involved in analyzing the NOAA/GISS data and software, and he chronicles his often frustrating experiences at his fascinating website. There, detail-seekers will find plenty to satisfy, divided into easily-navigated sections — some designed specifically for us “geeks,” but most readily approachable to readers of all technical strata.
Perhaps the key point discovered by Smith was that by 1990, NOAA had deleted from its datasets all but 1,500 of the 6,000 thermometers in service around the globe. Now, 75% represents quite a drop in sampling population, particularly considering that these stations provide the readings used to compile both the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) and United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) datasets. These are the same datasets, incidentally, which serve as primary sources of temperature data not only for climate researchers and universities worldwide, but also for the many international agencies using the data to create analytical temperature anomaly maps and charts.
Yet as disturbing as the number of dropped stations was, it is the nature of NOAA’s “selection bias” that Smith found infinitely more troubling.
It seems that stations placed in historically cooler, rural areas of higher latitude and elevation were scrapped from the data series in favor of more urban locales at lower latitudes and elevations. Consequently, post-1990 readings have been biased to the warm side not only by selective geographic location, but also by the anthropogenic heating influence of a phenomenon known as the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI).For example, Canada’s reporting stations dropped from 496 in 1989 to 44 in 1991, with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations dropped to one. That’s right: As Smith wrote in his blog, they left “one thermometer for everything north of LAT 65.” And that one resides in a place called Eureka, which has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to its unusually moderate summers. [Anthony Watts]
Read the rest at the link, but this isn’t the first time that NASA’s GISS has been caught manipulating data.
2:47 pm on January 26th, 2010 1
"For example, Canada’s reporting stations dropped from 496 in 1989 to 44 in 1991, with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations dropped to one."
Either way, just heard from my brother that it's +5 centigrade back home. The previously recorded high temperature for January in my home province was -4C.
3:11 pm on January 26th, 2010 2
The outside temperature gauge in my car said 24 degrees! Global Warming My Azz!
8:15 pm on January 26th, 2010 3
So by 1990 (long before global warming was discussed much), NASA dropped a significant number of reporting stations. Did NASA give a reason for this? Or do we want to believe that the whole global warming conspiracy began way back then?
Secondly, does it matter anyway if the warming trend continues? If there is no global warming going on, wouldn't we see a big jump in, say, 1991, when the data from many stations was excluded from their surveys, and then a plateau from there?
And finally, is the ice at the polar caps and glaciers melting or not?
So I fail to see why this particular story is big news. Are we just seeing both sides of the debate prone to giving misleading 'evidence'?
As for the link to the previous incident of NASA producing incorrect figures (and then fixing them), that was for America stations only. One locality doesn't mean much if the overall global temperatures are rising.
11:59 am on January 27th, 2010 4
The ice at the northern polar region is melting, but the ice shelves at the southern polar region are actually increasing. The Earth isn't in a perfect orbit around the sun, and our orbit isn't constant, it actually changes slightly from year to year which cause's different parts of the planet to receive different amounts of sunlight each year. This is in a 30~ish year patter, if you read back in the 1970's the world was getting colder because we were farther from the sun, then we started getting slightly closer to the sun so the earth warmed up a bit.
The debated point is that CO2 production is causing the temperature to go up and that it will cause the world to go into a run-away heating cycle that will cook the entire planet within 30 (they used to say 10) years. This hasn't been proven true, and all indicators was that it was false. But the various agencies that depend on "climate" money for their research had to keep the golden chicken pooping eggs. So they cooked the books on just about every bit of climate research produced since 1990. This is why you can't rely on anything said / produced by the major climate research centers. In order for them to keep their jobs the world temperature must be shown to go up, and the cause must be shown to be man made, regardless if its the truth or not.