Two weeks ago, under the headline
“How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”,
I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog,
had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations
in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded.
In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been
dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that
showed a marked warming.
Following
my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American
weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the
same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US
government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then
amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard
Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate
Data Center
(NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across
the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these
are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their
belief in “global warming”.
Homewood
has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the
Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87
degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments
have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was
indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no
one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate
research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in
touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely
“disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of
extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s
economy.
One
of the first examples of these “adjustments” was exposed in 2007 by the
statistician Steve McIntyre, when he discovered a paper published in
1987 by James Hansen, the scientist (later turned fanatical climate
activist) who for many years ran Giss. Hansen’s original graph showed
temperatures in the Arctic as having been much higher around 1940 than
at any time since. But as Homewood reveals in his blog post,
“Temperature adjustments
transform
Arctic history”, Giss has turned this upside down. Arctic temperatures
from that time have been lowered so much that that they are now dwarfed
by those of the past 20 years.
Homewood’s
interest in the Arctic is partly because the “vanishing” of its polar
ice (and the polar bears) has become such a poster-child for those
trying to persuade us that we are threatened by runaway warming. But he
chose that particular stretch of the Arctic because it is where ice is
affected by warmer water brought in by cyclical shifts in a major
Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years ago when
Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The
ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.
Of
much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale
manipulation of the official temperature record – for reasons GHCN and
Giss have never plausibly explained – has become the real elephant in
the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This
really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals
of all time.
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