newsflash

Woowheee!! Yee-haw! Have you read? It's all over the blogosphere. The right wing blogosphere is just giddy! Words like "Climate Porn" and "debunked" and "drastic changes to the data" and "rotten, filthy, scientists" (I added that last one) are just flying all over the place.
All this because 'bloggers have totally debunked global warming'!!! It's OK! We can go back to our SUVS and air conditioned houses and continue to buy food from the opposite coast without a shred of guilt anymore. Whatever am I going to do with my cloth shopping bags now?

See, some guy found an error in the surface temperature data compiled by NASA GISS (partly overseen by none other than Dr. James Hansen - he's that scientist that caused an uproar when he outed NASA's public affairs office when they tried to keep him from talking about his global warming research, the cad). Worse, when this horrible error was pointed out to the scientists, they not only agreed the data was in error, but they corrected it and republished it on their public archive. Can you imagine? Oops, I meant to say that they "quietly" revised the data under the cover of darkness, those slimy so-and-so's. But boy did they underestimate that extra astute right wing, conspiracy-revealing, "global warming myth" crowd. Such an intelligent bunch!! Nothing gets past *them*.

For your enjoyment, here are a few snippets of soundbites you might find about this "controversy."

"Does [such an] an agenda excuse such excess of professional scientists?"

:...government agency is actually participating in a fraud against the American people by withholding information crucial to a major policy issue now facing the nation."

"I would welcome letters to GISS urging them to fully disclose their source code."

(bleah. There is not much that is more tiresome than digging through someone else's code. Do these people really know what they are asking for?)
Even better - this whole "cover-up" is being blamed on a "Y2K" bug. I was waiting and waiting and waiting for something to finally come of that switchover. It took a while, but voila!

According to the DailyTech blog, the NASA temperature data used to estimate the advance of global warming has been shown to be way off the mark, due to a Y2K bug in the graphing software—and the corrected charts tell a very different story:

The Y2K coding bug twist that appeared somewhere in the growth of this story is hilarious. It has nothing to do with anything other than the fact that the year 2000 was involved in a change in the way of reporting some things. (By the way - in more seriousness, I'm not linking to the original sources of some of these pseudo-quotes because the authors are totally and completely deluded and basically intellectually challenged and misguided and not very scientifically enlightened I'm not about to help them spread their disease of idiocy. If you want to read them, google pulls up plenty of sites.)

Yes. Steve McIntyre found an error when examining trends in temperature data compiled on the GISS website (more on the "error" in a second). He was puzzled by a "jump" in data at several stations at the same year, and wrote an email to GISS scientists working on this, who looked into it, discovered the error, corrected the data, promptly corrected their public archive, and credited McIntyre with a personal email and public acknowledgment. (all this cover-up makes me shudder...ewww). Just look at this cover-up statement put right up on the GISS data site when the error was corrected by these sneaky scientists.

Input data for the analysis, collected by many national meteorological services around the world, is the unadjusted data of the Global Historical Climatology Network (Peterson and Vose, 1997 and 1998) except that the USHCN station records up to 1999 were replaced by a version of USHCN data with further corrections after an adjustment computed by comparing the common 1990-1999 period of the two data sets. (We wish to thank Stephen McIntyre for bringing to our attention that such an adjustment is necessary to prevent creating an artificial jump in year 2000.)

Ya think I'm being a little sarcastic?

Yeah, I'm pissed (again), especially after reading about how we nasty scientists need to be more transparent and publish our code and "scripts." Oh such a secretive bunch we are... other than the scads of publicly available scientific literature that is peer reviewed and published in journals available at many libraries and online, with the universal requirement of "reproducibility" - i.e., every paper I publish is required to contain enough information that the results can be reproduced by other scientists. Maybe these bloggers don't realize that. Or maybe the problem is that a baseline of some intelligence and scientific knowledge is required in order to understand what was done in the analysis. Or that the raw data is available at the GISS website. I could go on, but I digress.

We were talking about this tremendous "error" that has drastically changed the data! and completely debunked global warming! and shows how we Gore-loving liberal scientists have been horribly sloppy and depended on junk science to come up with and perpetrated this myth.
You wanna see? Huh? Huh?



I got this plot from the following blog: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/08/12/before-and-after/
The plot shows global average temperature from 1880 to today, red diamonds are the original GISS data and the open diamonds are corrected with this earth-shattering, global warming debunking, incredible "error" discovered by bloggers. Can you see the difference? Me either.
That's because it is insignificant. It's slightly more significant when you look only at the US data (meaning, you can actually kind of make out any difference at all). This link is to Dr. Hansen's email reply to this supposed controversy, and includes plots for temperature trends before and after the "correction" for the globe and for the US. If you take a look at this link, the little bit of green you see at the end of the US plot shows the "difference". And if you look at the large peaks in annual temperatures for 1934 and 1998, those two "jumps" that look identical with no noticeable change in the uncorrected and corrected data? Those are the two points that the likes of Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the right wing blogospere are using to shout (loudly) about how this "error" has drastically changed the conclusions on global warming because the 1934 peak is something like .02 degrees higher than 1998 rather than the other way around now. So from this it's absolutely CLEAR that "global warming" was limited to the dust bowl days of the Great Depression and any warming trend is clearly a hoax now, right? Excuse me while I bang my forehead on the desk a few more times.

This is such a stupid, even-less-than-minor thing that in a saner world would be totally unnoticed because it is SO ESOTERIC AND BORING, but in the naive, brainwashed world of the global warming naysayers, it has been twisted into a completely false, completely misleading pile of propaganda crap that in no way resembles reality.

Good. Lord.

Someone please reassure me that the collective wisdom and intelligence of this country is higher than this. I feel a little dirty after I read the arguments on these blogs. Makes my head hurt to think of the twisted logic that is attempting to pass for reason. Maybe I should stop visiting them, but quite honestly, I really do like to try to keep an open mind and think about arguments that I've not heard before to discover if there is truth in them that I've overlooked. Call ME naive, but I figure I don't know something well until I've looked at it from all sides and from all directions. Somewhere, I have the (perhaps deluded) hope that there are intelligent arguments against global warming. Because in reality, I would really love for that to be true. (and if I published something reasonable to that effect, I would be a superstar). But so far, I've not come across anything that passes muster.

What really upsets me is that I know at least a modicum of these bloggers really are smart. So the fact that they buy into these arguments and perpetrate them means they are either lazy (too lazy to do their research), naive (don't think they need to do research in the first place), or brainwashed (propagandaists). I'm more than happy to listen to dissenting views. That's my job and I do enjoy it. But let's limit it to intelligent arguments, shall we? These ridiculous ones are tiresome.

For an intelligent and reasoned look at this issue by people that know this kind of science, check out what the Real Climate guys say.