Watts Up With That?

It has been one of those days…first the GISS data train wreck in apparently reusing last months temperatures to make this months “hottest October ever” announcement, now we find that the director of The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) may not have the goods for the PhD he goes by. He’s about to become the president of the American Meteorological Society. Interesting times – Anthony

Dr. Pepper, Dr. J, Dr. Karl . . .   [Chris Horner]

Well, this testimony, submitted to the House of Representatives is strange, what with “Dr. Tom Karl” – now the lead author of the U.S. government’s Climate Change Science Program assessment being prepared to support EPA regulation of carbon dioxide – having never earned an academic Ph.D.

That’s according to North Carolina State University, that is, which is the school from which I found a Karl resume claiming a Ph.D., earned “1977-78″. I first found this on a Johns Hopkins website but, after asking Karl’s employer NOAA to clarify where the “Dr.” title they serially tout was earned, that CV has been taken down (but not before I saved the file, of course). NOAA wouldn’t answer my question, but only sniffed that if I can point to them claiming Karl has a Ph.D. – as opposed to just promoting him as “Dr. Karl” apparently on the basis of a 2002 honorary doctorate of humane letters – I should tell them.

The thing is, I have just received documents under the Freedom of Information Act showing that Mr. Karl is indeed styled as “Dr. Karl” on the express basis of having earned that 1978 NCSU Ph.D., as a proposed “co-investigator” in an application for a million-dollar-plus federal grant. The grant was awarded. No word yet whether the U.S. mail was involved in the process. Read the rest of this entry »

by John Goetz

Update: Thanks to an email from John S. – a patron of climateaudit.org – we have learned that the Russian data in NOAA’s GHCN v2.mean dataset is corrupted. For most (if not all) stations in Russia, the September data has been replicated as October data, artificially raising the October temperature many degrees. The data from NOAA is used by GISS to calculate the global temperature. Thus the record-setting anomaly for October 2008 is invalid and we await the highly-publicised corrections from NOAA and GISS.

Update 2: The faulty results have been (mostly) backed out of the GISS website. The rest should be done following the federal holiday. GISS says they will update the analysis once they confirm with NOAA that the software problems have been corrected. I also removed the subtitles since the GISS data no longer reflects October as being the warmest ever.

GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Studies) Surface Temperature Analysis (GISSTemp) released their monthly global temperature anomaly data for October 2008. Following is the monthly global ∆T from January to October 2008:

Year J  F  M  A  M  J  J  A  S  O
2007 85 61 59 64 55 53 53 56 50 54
2008 14 25 62 36 40 32 52 39 50 78


Here is a plot of the GISSTemp monthly anomaly since January 1979 (keeping in line with the time period displayed for UAH). I have added a simple 12-month moving average displayed in red.

The addition of October has changed some of the temperatures for earlier months:


GISS 2008   J  F  M  A  M  J  J  A  S  O
As of 9/08  14 25 62 36 40 29 53 50 49 ..
As of 10/08 14 25 62 36 40 32 52 39 50 78


The 0.78 C anomaly in October is the largest ever for October, and one of the largest anomalies ever recorded. Although North America was cooler than normal, Asia apparently suffered from a massive heat wave.

Also, after several months of being downgraded to a 0.61 C anomaly, 2005 has been lifted back to 0.62 C.