When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.
Read more at the Telegraph
It’s hard to tell people that the actual records are being falsified. I am not surprised.
yup. Their minds are made up. No matter what FACTS you throw in their face and the perps actually admit to their lies, they will still believe in this crap.
Yes it’s sad because you have an organization that is supposed to be a trusted authority and they are manipulating the data to promote a lie.
Especially when the data is obtained world-wide by a variety of sources. Talk about your global conspiracies! Where do you guys stand on fluoride?
Suppose you are a climatologist. Few people really understand what you do for a living, and even fewer can see how studying the climate makes much practical difference in how people live their lives. Then you and your pals come up with a theory that atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is an unavoidable byproduct of human prosperity, will result in the end of human life. This is such a dramatic and perversely entertaining story (whose subtext is, ease and pleasure and wealth is inherently destructive, which has always been a popular belief among a large cohort of human beings) that many people are compelled to believe it right from the start, and the news media love it and hype it, and extol you as a solon whose special knowledge will save mankind. And people give you money and admire you and listen raptly to what you say, and you get more money and admiration and attention if you make the story more alarming. And then you say that the solution to the problem is to tax the profits of Big Oil (who are smug and powerful and therefore evil) and give the money to everybody else. Especially climatologists. And a core ingredient of the story is that it cannot be falsified in your lifetime. Wouldn’t you get a little creative?
Yeah.
I apologize if I’m reading you wrong, but are you condoning this, or are you just being a little sarcastic? It seems like you’re saying it’s just fine and dandy, and that I would do it too given an opportunity to do so. Do I have that wrong?
No Neillo, I am not condoning it. I am condemning it. I live in the Canadian province of Alberta, and we have billions of dollars of bitumen that we can’t get to market because environmentalists are blocking the building of pipelines. The Global Warming monsters-under-the-bed story will cost Albertans billions in revenue, and hundreds of thousands of us will be ruined. This is not, to environmentalists, an unfortunate byproduct of saving humanity from the wrath of a polluted sky. It is a just punishment for sinners, and they delight in it.
Scratch an global warming activist and you will find, not an altruistic crusader for a safer, cleaner future, but a mean, self-aggrandizing misanthrope who is perfectly comfortable with lying and cheating in the service of spreading misery among as many people as possible.
I hope that was clear.
Ok, cool beans! I think your sarcasm was just a little too good, and I wasn’t sure.
But yes, I think you’re right about the environmentalists. Except I don’t think they see it as a punishment for sinners, it’s more of their goal to destroy capitalism and industrialization and they think they are doing you a favor by ruining you. It’s for your own good you see.
And another thing: Show me even one environmental activist who lives his everyday life as if he thinks that he has a moral obligation to cut carbon dioxide emissions by eschewing modern industrial outputs.. Show me one who would be willing to, say, quit using a cell phone, or take the bus to work if he can afford to operate a motor vehicle. And these are the guys who want us to renounce the energy sources that made possible the great leap forward in human prosperity of the Twentieth Century.
In the year 1900, London, Paris and New York stank of horse manure. Horses deposited millions of tons of manure on the roads of these great cities every day. Now that was a pollution problem. That is the pollution problem that the products of Big Oil solved, so the money that the oil barons made was well-earned, wouldn’t you say?
Who were the greatest Americans of the Twentieth Century? Thomas Edison and Henry Ford are on the top of my list. And Johnny Cash. I’m a big Johnny Cash fan, and I don’t care who knows it.
Yeah since oil is natural and good for the environment and horse manure isn’t
Which would you rather step in?
So I suppose you’d rather have streets that look like this? Oh yeah, that’s piles upon piles of horse manure. I think that could be considered environmental pollution. Wouldn’t you agree?
LOL, IKR?! That horse manure, woooie! Just about ended life as we knew it. Close call, that one.
An interesting historical fact: ocean-going ships used to be completely powered by a green and renewable energy source, namely the wind. Why did the men who follow the sea not realize the damage they would do to us all by turning their backs on the perfect way to travel on the water? Hey, good enough for Magellan, good enough for me, I always say.
If I seem a little bitter, just a little inclined to angry sarcasm, well, it’s because I’m an addict, and the shame of it is ruining my disposition. Every day I get up and within minutes of rising I am using energy derived from burning coal and petroleum, unlike Bill McKibben or George Monbiot, who shouldn’t have to share the planet with selfish, debauched wastrels like me. In fact, they shouldn’t have to share the planet with anyone, and they clearly don’t want to, as the big pollution problem we have here is, let’s face it, people. We’re a virus, and we’re sickening the Earth. I think I’ll have a cheeseburger and a couple of cigarettes, as my way of punishing myself for being here.
First – sit down – this may be difficult for you. If we still used wind energy to cross oceans it would take weeks – months for a single Atlantic crossing. Avoiding dangerous storms would be nearly impossible. Of course , this would help the shark population , which the enviros are concerned about. There is NO credible proof that c02 causes global warming. There is NO real proof that global warming is happening. There is NO proof that the seas are rising. . . Remember years ago the enviro cry was that were running out of water? Then the alarmists shriek over global cooling? Then Global Warming was changed to “climate change” to cover EVERYTHING!. Are there areas of pollution ?? Of course there are, and always will be. But nothing man made can ever compare with the enviro damage that a volcano can cause.
Hey, Sharks gotta eat too!! Oh have you heard? There is a push now to call it global dying! I sh*t you not. So it is now globalwarmingclimatechangedisruptiondying. I think that we can now say the global warming movement has officially jumped the shark! 🙂
When in the past measurements were made like in the afternoon, and now they’re making them in the morning, of course we do not need to adjust them or otherwise we would be accused of fraud by climate deniers.
I’m pretty sure they take more than one reading per day. And they already make adjustments. They make more adjustments to the temperature data than Captain Picard adjusts his tunic in any given episode of Star Trek TNG.
How can you be pretty sure about your assumptions, as you’re not a climatologist or even a weathermen?
Right back at you. How can you? You are neither either.
I was “pretty sure” because I read it a long time ago, (probably when you were still playing with playdough) and it was not in the forefront of my memory. But I have refreshed my memory since then and now I am no longer “pretty sure”. I am now 100% positive. What they do is take readings all day long. Then they take the high temp, and the low temp, add them together, then divide by 2 to get the average for that day.
Interesting fact: wind is becoming a popular and viable source of renewable energy. Fun Fact- Texas has one of the worlds largest wind generator “farms” (area with generators) in the world, and Germany is using it and solar almost as much as more traditional sources of energy.
Here in Canada, the governors of the province of Ontario made a huge investment in wind turbines for electrical power generation. As a consequence, the citizens of Ontario now pay more for electrical power than the citizens of any other Canadian province. The economics just aren’t there. Wind turbines can’t deliver the same horsepower per dollar as coal or natural gas. As if that weren’t drawback enough, the wind turbines are of course dependent on the wind, which is inconstant, and the electrical grid requires traditional power stations to backstop the unreliable wind turbine outputs. And on top of that, people object to the wind turbines as eyesores.
The way to bet in power generation for the future is a retooling from coal to natural gas. But wind turbines? A fad and an expensive folly.
Actually, Germany used more coal in 2013 than any year since 1990. Germany is trying to buy US coal to power its plants to get away from Russia.The avg household pays $265 in green energy subsidy. Green Germany is a colossal flop. Facts.
Rob, you must have missed the articles this week that Germany is stopping the heavy subsidies for the solar energy concerns. Seems solar can’t survive without heavy government subsidies.
Maybe we should stop giving subsidies and tax benefits to any fossil fuel, nuclear or energy source period? Just a small carbon tax that will benefit the poor would do just fine.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2014/01/the-fix-in-fossil-fuels
You are a good tool, and mouthpiece for the environmental left. You regurgitate their propaganda faithfully. Look out RNH, I think Fister in gunning for your spot!
Ah, the left and right argument. That’s what it comes down to for you doesn’t it? It’s all you got.
That’s not all I got. Not by a long shot there phister. Are you denying that you are an environmentalist Leftist?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/04/ushcn-surface-temperatures-1973-2012-dramatic-warming-adjustments-noisy-trends/
Since NOAA encourages the use the USHCN station network as the official U.S. climate record, I have analyzed the average [(Tmax+Tmin)/2] USHCN version 2 dataset in the same way I analyzed the CRUTem3 and International Surface Hourly (ISH) data.
The main conclusions are:
1) The linear warming trend during 1973-2012 is greatest in USHCN (+0.245 C/decade), followed by CRUTem3 (+0.198 C/decade), then my ISH population density adjusted temperatures (PDAT) as a distant third (+0.013 C/decade)
2) Virtually all of the USHCN warming since 1973 appears to be the result of adjustments NOAA has made to the data, mainly in the 1995-97 timeframe.
3) While there seems to be some residual Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect in the U.S. Midwest, and even some spurious cooling with population density in the Southwest, for all of the 1,200 USHCN stations together there is little correlation between station temperature trends and population density.
4) Despite homogeneity adjustments in the USHCN record to increase agreement between neighboring stations, USHCN trends are actually noisier than what I get using 4x per day ISH temperatures and a simple UHI correction.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/GISS_Arctic.pdf
“Hansen’s trick of replacing measured sea surface temperatures with land measured temperatures in areas with seasonal sea ice caused a large warming bias in the global temperature trend. Bob Tisdale says, “They increased the trend of the global sea surface temperature anomalies from 0.088 degrees Celsius per decade to 0.125 degrees Celsius per decade or about 42%.”’
Oh, yeah I got lot’s more where that came from o’tool fryster. Hmmm, Left or Right didn’t come up once! 😉
Ok. How does a small carbon tax benefit the poor? And can you specify what subsidies, and tax benefits a fossil fuel company gets? I’m curious, really. Because I don’t know what they are. And I don’t think you know either. I think you are just repeating propaganda that you have heard and mistaken for reality.
Hey RNH, this is right up your alley. I’m sure you’ve heard that before, in fact I think I’ve heard you say something similar to it. What are these tax breaks and subsidies big oil gets? And are they special, as in only big fossil fuel gets them? I am genuinely curious. Curious to see if you guys know what they are and can point them out. Or if you are both spouting propaganda BS.
Just something the IEA said about fossil fuel subsidies.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/04/us-iea-idUSTRE7931CF20111004
Carbon tax will benefit the poor as the tax goes back to the public (best is that a deal can be struck here), and the rich generate the most tax as they pollute the most.
Yeah, while the electricity and energy costs of the poor skyrocket.
I can tell you what the end-of-the-world enthusiasts consider a subsidy, Neillo. It goes like this: Free markets do not reflect the true costs of burning fossil fuels. Petroleum and coal companies are allowed to sell their products which, when consumed, cause untold trillions of dollars in costs in human health and environmental damage, and governments pay those costs in the form of medical benefits, and eventually measures to deal with the effects of global climate change. Hence, subsidies. Therefore it is only just that those who profit from the sale of petroleum and coal be taxed (a “carbon tax”, which sounds less direct than, say, a gasoline tax, or a home-heating oil tax) with the proceeds of the tax to be paid back to citizens in various ways.
It is not just people on the political left who go for this. David Frum, a noted neoconservative who is always on the lookout for an excuse to cut income taxes, says that a carbon tax could be made revenue neutral by reducing marginal rates. See? Once you have established a rationale for lifting billions of dollars in revenues from somebody who has the money to pay, everybody wants a cut for themselves and their friends. For people on the right, a carbon tax yields a double benefit: The affluent get a tax cut and gas becomes so expensive that a lot of annoying less-affluent people can’t afford to drive, and cease to clutter up the roads with their proletarian Chevies and Fords.
I assure you that I oppose a carbon tax. Of course, I go along with you here that anthropogenic global warming is an extremely entertaining fiction. It’s like the Y2K computer bug, or the heterosexually driven AIDS epidemic, both of which were just plausible enough that educated people fell for them.
Well, that makes it about as clear as mud, but thanks. I do appreciate the effort though I wanted Shyster to explain it because I think he’s just repeating propaganda and has no idea of what he’s talking about.
Ian, not really. The fossil-fuel support policies that governments use include direct subsidies, intervention in markets in ways that affect costs or prices, assumption of a part of companies’ financial risks, tax reductions or exemptions, and under – charging for the use of government – supplied goods, services or assets.
Now tell me how you mixed that up with medical benefits? Or is this your personal imagination?
I’m going to have to concede you your points (seriously and without sarcasm, this time), Fiester.
The health benefits argument goes like this: Here in Canada the people who are beating the drums about global climate change are notable for their hatred of the oil companies, and like to compare them to Big Tobacco. This is not meant as a metaphor but a straight-up comparison of similar states of guilt, and a corollary of it is that air pollution causes illnesses which must then be treated at government cost. (In Canada, everyone has government-mandated single-payer health insurance,) That’s where that argument came from.
Also, in the province of Alberta, which is economically dependent on oil and gas, the government grants petroleum companies rights of eminent domain when the seek land title for drilling and pipelines. So yes, petroleum companies are in point of fact heavily subsidized by our governments. Not only that but the government owns the mineral resources outright, and petroleum companies must pay the government a per unit royalty for the oil and gas they extract. There are constant and credible arguments that the royalties are too low, so that is, in effect, a subsidy.
My answer to the question of the fairness of subsidies is that petroleum companies give back benefits that are well in excess of the value of the subsidies they receive. Imagine what would happen if the oil companies pulled an Atlas Shrugged and went on strike for a year. How many people in Canada and the United States would literally die from the effects of sudden poverty as a result? Hundreds of thousands. People who hate oil companies amaze me with their ingratitude, and their seeming incomprehension of how good their lives are thanks to the wonders of oil and coal. That’s what that little riff about the horse manure was about. Think how much better our lives are now than in 1900.
A core irrationality of environmentalists is that there is some nonpolluting energy source that can replace petroleum and coal, at no great cost to the general standard of living. No there isn’t. They are proving that in Germany right now.
They compare oil companies to big tobacco because of it’s denial tactics.
Well, we can thank the tobacco companies. In the 1980s, big tobacco paid big money to establish “independent” think tanks and “research” institutes that were charged with confusing the public over the dangers of sidestream smoke.
Astroturfing began when Imperial Tobacco, Canada’s largest tobacco manufacturer, commissioned a secret study that weighed various strategies for combating the growing influence of nonsmoking groups like The Lung Association and the Nonsmokers Rights Association.
“Passive smoking [should be] the focal point,” the study suggests. “Of all the health issues surrounding smoking… the one that the tobacco industry has the most chance of winning [is to argue] that the evidence proclaimed by [anti-smoking groups] is flawed… It is highly desirable for us to control the focus of the debate.” Later, the study urges a comprehensive attack on “the credibility of the evidence presented to date,” and tells the company to hire several doctors and scientists who would be willing to take their side.
People will adapt, no one will die. Certainly not hundreds of thousands. Got any proof with such vastly exaggerated claims?
Large scale employment of renewables can only work if we also start saving energy. That’s the problem in Germany.
Talking about large scale killings, Syria is doing rather well. A conflict triggered by global warming.
Syria couldn’t manage a four-year drought when it had a government, and that drought helped fuel the uprising there, because the government did nothing for the people. Imagine what will happen if they have another prolonged drought and they’ve destroyed half their country?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/opinion/friedman-wikileaks-drought-and-syria.html
So it was global warming that made protesters demand democratic reforms, and it was also global warming that made the government troops fire upon the protesters? And it’s global warming that makes the Sunni’s and the Shiites hate each other? Wow global warming is waaaaaay more powerful than I thought.
Sound like you didn’t read the article Neilio. The questions you ask are answered in the article.
Which article? The one you posted above? Um, yup, you’re right I didn’t read it. And I’ll tell you why. Because it is a deflection. A distraction. It is an attempt by you to change the subject. And that subject is the manipulation of temperature data by the NOAA to show warming in the record where there was none.
as far as what you’re trying to change the subject to, it is not something I am too concerned about because if it’s things that everyone else gets it’s not free market, and if it’s special to the oil and gas industry it’s cronyism and should be stopped. I don’t like it, but it is not going to affect practically every facet of my life like reducing carbon emissions will. You don’t understand that reducing carbon emissions will impact the quality of everyone’s life by increasing the cost of everything by reducing the supply of energy to a world of growing demand. Solar and wind are never going to replace fossil fuels, ever.
Are you going to truck food to ports and ship it by sea or rail with solar power, or wind power? No you won’t, so what will happen to the price of food? Clothing? Orange juice? Coffee? Electronics? Well, electronics, if you go reducing carbon emissions any manufactured goods are going to get a double whammy, the production costs will skyrocket, and so will the transportation costs. Ian is right, you have no idea how much YOU depend on fossil fuels for everyday things that you take for granted.
And here we have a so called trusted body trying to accomplish the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it by manipulating data to support a lie. You should be outraged by this, we all should be outraged. But because it supports your view it’s fine. So fine that you want to distract anyone from talking about it. Shameful.
I did go ahead and read that Routers article and it does not say what the subsidies are, in fact it doesn’t answer any of my questions at all. It just says that subsidies are going up. That’s it. No details on what the subsidies are, or what they’re for. Did you read the article?
Now Fiester, the evidence of the harms of smoking really could be established scientifically. You had two distinct cohorts of people, long-term smokers and people who had never smoked, and you could compare the health histories of the people in the cohorts. Global climate change cannot be so clearly proved. We do not have a “control” Earth that did not burn petroleum and coal to compare to the Earth where petroleum and coal were burned. We do have a period of human history, the Twentieth Century, where petroleum and coal were common fuels to compare with all the other centuries when they were not. The comparison in human ease and prosperity is pretty stark, wouldn’t you say? Sitting in front of your computer with food in you refrigerator and money in your bank account, wouldn’t you say that?
In my naivety I thought that, once the Climategate e-mails became public, the global warming delusion would collapse. You can actually read ranking climate scientists admitting to each other that global warming has paused, and then scheming to figure out a way to conceal the pause, which was in itself a tacit admission that the theory to which they had devoted their careers had been falsified. But no. Climate change is such a compellingly entertaining theory that were allowed to pretend that they were just discussing using a legitimate statistical method to rectify anomalous data. What a scandal. What a refutation of honest Science.
Nice comparison to global warming and smoking, but what’s your point? It’s like apples and pears. Totally uninteresting.
And Fiester, you have the sort of wonderful imagination that can visualize the Atlantic Ocean swamping Manhattan in a hundred years, yet apparently you cannot visualize what your city would look like after one month without access to gasoline, diesel fuel, coal or natural gas. How would you get food? Oxen and freight wagons? What would you do without electricity? Think of all the privileges that the products of Big Oil allow you and yet leave you with enough money and leisure of your own to annoy me. Who is endlessly patient, and what a lucky break that is for you.
If I wanted to sell you tobacco and get you addicted so that you would give me your money until use of the tobacco killed you, well, I could see you resenting that. But oil companies want to sell you a product that will make you happier, healthier and more prosperous. Provided you don’t drink it. They should put, “don’t drink this” on barrels of gasoline, because people stupid enough to believe global warming activists are stupid enough to drink gasoline.
Which raises another little thing that bugs me: Climate change alarmists have cast themselves as the prudent, scientific ones, and climate change skeptics as greedy fools. Bugs me, bugs me, bugs me. (Why is there no swearing allowed in these forums? How much can a man be expected to take without swearing?)
I don’t give a f*** about swearing. But the designers of this site want as wide of an audience as it can get so swearing, and personal attacks are prohibited. Just do what I do and use a symbol instead of letters like I did in the first sentence. You could tell what I meant.
I really like your point about what things would be like after a month with out fuels.
I don’t live in Canada, I live in Minnesota in the U.S., so I don’t know what it is like for oil companies there. I really don’t know what it’s like for oil companies here either. If they are getting the same tax breaks, or subsidies that every other company gets, I don’t see what the issue is. I’m not saying I’m for that. That is not free markets operating the way they should, but if they’re the same deals that everyone gets I hardly see the point of picking on the oil companies for doing what everyone else does. If they are getting special deals that no one else does then that is not something I would support either. That is cronyism and I also don’t think that’s right. But if that is what it is then you still can’t pick solely on the oil companies because there is cronyism across all sectors which I think needs to stop.
But it is a great way to steer the discussion away from global warming, isn’t it? Attacking the oil companies makes that CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels is causing global warming a forgone conclusion. It assumes it is true, and completely bypasses the argument. So if we start arguing about this then we are tacitly implying a concession that the warmists are right about CO2, which I don’t think they are.
Here’s a story I read today.
Australia’s largest coalminer, Glencore, paid almost zero tax over the past three years, despite income of $15 billion, as it radically reduced its tax exposure by taking large, unnecessarily expensive loans from its associates overseas.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/glencore-tax-bill-on-15b-income-zip-zilch-zero-20140626-3awg0.html
So to give renewable a little push only seems fair for the competition. Unless you don’t want fair competition of course.
How did we get from the stone age to where we are now? Not with one great mind that invented all we have today. It takes many steps. With each step you take the next step is easier. And along the way you think of things you couldn’t possibly think of before while you were living in the stone age. It’s called evolution. Man evolves with each step and thinks of new things. That’s how it works.
In that regard we have to take a few steps to think of new things we could possibly have thought of before. On a journey from A to Z you first have to go to B. But if you’re not willing to go to B getting to Z is kinda impossible.
At the moment there’s many steps we can take before we have to think of new things.
To reiterate Neilio’s comments, this is intended as a family-friendly forum. People of all ages from all walks of life, all over the world stop in here. Swearing is not appropriate here, nor are personal attacks on commentators (everyone can use a refresher on that from time to time). We’re trying to foster open and (to the extent possible), friendly discussion about the global warming stories presented here. We try to stick to the issues. Swear at your monitor, but please don’t type it here! – Site manager
Al Gore has an article in the current issue of Rolling Stone, and in it he makes a very good case for solar panels on individual buildings. Once again, Fiester, I’m gong to have to concede that I’m making a lot of assumptions about what is and isn’t possible. Who could have foreseen the internet revolution, for example. It could well be that there are ways to make nonpolluting energy sources work.
Don’t worry, Neillo, that swearing thing was just a joke. I think my jokes are funny, and that’s the main thing.
Thanks Ian. Though I live in a flat without a roof, I subscribed to 7,5 M2 of solar panels they’re building on an abandoned site. This will supply more energy than I personally use. If more would do this that would be great. Our electricity prices in The Netherlands are among the highest in the world. Higher than Germany anyway.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/graph-of-the-day-average-electricity-prices-around-the-world-24207
And still I think they are too low and should be higher. And no, I don’t live in the stone age like some would suggest. There are solutions out there and people can make steps to solve this. Putting solar on your roof is one of them.
“And still I think they are too low and should be higher.” -Feister, about his electricity prices.
I’m sorry, can you please explain why you think your electricity prices should be higher? I think I know but I would like to hear it from you before I speculate on why that is.