James Hansen on the Warmest Year Brouhaha

Jamie writes "In response to earlier reports, Dr. James Hansen, top climate scientist with NASA, has issued a statement on the recent global warming data correction. He points out 'the effect on global temperature was of order one-thousandth of a degree, so the corrected and uncorrected curves are indistinguishable.' In a second email he shows maps of U.S. temperatures relative to the world in 1934 and 1998, explains why the error occurred (it was not, as reported, a 'Y2K bug') and, in response to errors by 'Fox, Washington Times, and their like,' attacks the 'deceit' of those who 'are not stupid [but] seek to create a brouhaha and muddy the waters in the climate change story.'"

Comments

Not global warming. Global climate change.

[MMC Monster]

Why do we still call it global warming? It's global climate change. Some areas will get warmer. Some areas will get cooler. Some areas will be under water.

The nice thing about it is that the majority of us will live to see the changes. We are in for some interesting times over the next 30-50 years. :-)

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[dbrutus]

The real problem is that this error had to be found out by reverse engineering because climate scientists have a bad habit of not releasing their code and data. We're told that they use a list of high quality temperature sensing stations and discouraged from actually checking. Then when somebody actually does go out and check, we find a significant fraction of them are just awful, hopelessly compromised by local heat island effects. Fixing those problems will only increase the accuracy of predictions and data quality but instead of welcoming it, we had an abortive attempt to take the station list locations private for "privacy reasons" after being public for decades.

Data quality is a major issue with global warming. If the numbers aren't right, we don't really know what's going on. This is just one more case of obfuscation hiding error and the AGW proponents falling back to the nearest trench line and adopting the same shoddy tactics of delay, deny, and obfuscate on data quality issues.

This is not how real science is done and that's why so many people who know and love the scientific method and its fruits have a growing unease about the whole AGW enterprise. Can you blame them?

The US is reputed to have one of the best temp sensor networks in the world and I believe has the only organized effort to go to original sources and check stations. Yet instead of calling for a review of all the data and figuring out, for real, how bad the problem is, what we get is a political effort to firewall the contamination and an implied "let's not bother" checking the rest. Real science is "trust but verify". Climate science seems to have a strain of something else going on.