By Blake Snow – FOXNews.com
Image: NASA / Goddard Institute for Space Studies – Maps from NASA’s GISS reveal temperatures where no data exist, thanks to mathematical extrapolation of data.
NASA was able to put a man on the moon, but the space agency can’t tell you what the temperature was when it did. By its own admission, NASA’s temperature records are in even worse shape than the besmirched Climate-gate data.
E-mail messages obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that NASA concluded that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) — the scandalized source of the leaked Climate-gate e-mails — and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center.
The e-mails from 2007 reveal that when a USA Today reporter asked if NASA’s data “was more accurate” than other climate-change data sets, NASA’s Dr. Reto A. Ruedy replied with an unequivocal no. He said “the National Climatic Data Center’s procedure of only using the best stations is more accurate,” admitting that some of his own procedures led to less accurate readings.
“My recommendation to you is to continue using NCDC’s data for the U.S. means and [East Anglia] data for the global means,” Ruedy told the reporter.
“NASA’s temperature data is worse than the Climate-gate temperature data. According to NASA,” wrote Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who uncovered the e-mails. Horner is skeptical of NCDC’s data as well, stating plainly: “Three out of the four temperature data sets stink.”
…
Global warming critics call this a crucial blow to advocates’ arguments that minor flaws in the “Climate-gate” data are unimportant, since all the major data sets arrive at the same conclusion — that the Earth is getting warmer. But there’s a good reason for that, the skeptics say: They all use the same data.
…
Neither NASA nor NOAA responded to requests for comment. But Dr. Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground, still believes the validity of data from NASA, NOAA and East Anglia would be in jeopardy only if the comparative analysis didn’t match. “I see no reason to question the integrity of the raw data,” he says. “Since the three organizations are all using mostly the same raw data, collected by the official weather agency of each individual country, the only issue here is whether the corrections done to the raw data were done correctly by CRU.”
Corrections are needed, Masters says, “since there are only a few thousand surface temperature recording sites with records going back 100+ years.” As such, climate agencies estimate temperatures in various ways for areas where there aren’t any thermometers, to account for the overall incomplete global picture.
“It would be nice if we had more global stations to enable the groups to do independent estimates using completely different raw data, but we don’t have that luxury,” Masters adds. “All three groups came up with very similar global temperature trends using mostly the same raw data but independent corrections. This should give us confidence that the three groups are probably doing reasonable corrections, given that the three final data sets match pretty well.”
But NASA is somewhat less confident, having quietly decided to tweak its corrections to the climate data earlier this month.
In an updated analysis of the surface temperature data released on March 19, NASA adjusted the raw temperature station data to account for inaccurate readings caused by heat-absorbing paved surfaces and buildings in a slightly different way. NASA determines which stations are urban with nighttime satellite photos, looking for stations near light sources as seen from space.
Of course, this doesn’t solve problems with NASA’s data, as the newest paper admits: “Much higher resolution would be needed to check for local problems with the placement of thermometers relative to possible building obstructions,” a problem repeatedly underscored by meteorologist Anthony Watts on his SurfaceStations.org Web site. Last month, Watts told FoxNews.com that “90 percent of them don’t meet [the government’s] old, simple rule called the ‘100-foot rule’ for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence. Ninety percent of them failed that, and we’ve got documentation.”
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“Three out of the four temperature data sets stink.”
So now we need to measure smell also.
‘…This should give us confidence that the three groups are probably doing reasonable corrections, given that the three final data sets match pretty well.”
Or the corrections are roughly equal and equally unreasonable.
I’m only commenting to encourage people here to open a Twitter account (I have no interest) and to click on “Follow WUWT on Twitter”
I usually arrive here before a single comment has been posted, after receiving a Tweet on Tweetdeck.
Twitter is the best way of receiving and following original content that I’ve ever encountered.
Take that, EPA! And stop shoving Cap and Trade down our throats!
<em.Global warming critics call this a crucial blow to advocates’ arguments that minor flaws in the “Climate-gate” data are unimportant, since all the major data sets arrive at the same conclusion — that the Earth is getting warmer. But there’s a good reason for that, the skeptics say: They all use the same data.
I guess the skeptics haven’t heard of the lower tropospheric satellite data.
But NASA is somewhat less confident, having quietly decided to tweak its corrections to the climate data earlier this month.
Yeah, they “quietly decided” by announcing the changes on their web site last January
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/updates/
Off topic. What is going on with Arctic ice extent?
It is defying the Statute of AGW.
Won’t last. Won’t be reported. And won’t be there when the numbers are corrected?
It’s all rotten anyway.
Off topic but noteworthy. The sea ice extent has finally matched the highest level shown for the last 9 years (corrected for day of year).
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
All the sets, AFAIK, use the same set of (unpublished?) “internationally accepted rules for adjustments” according to the New Zealand government folks that responded to the assertion a few months back that all the global warming in New Zealand was due to adjustments. If you use the same recipe, you should be expected to make the same soup.
Of course, Dr. Spencer’s work with the raw surface data (using 4 temps averaged instead of max/min which can suffer from time of observation bias, and/or corrections from it) showed a 20% lower trend… and that’s with no UHI corection.
[ OT but mods, I know Anthony is busy with his paper, but if anyone would be interested in reviewing a write-up I have been working on regarding UHI please e-mail me, an extra set of eyes on it would be greatly appreciated ]
This is really bad news. Now we will never be able the prove that the planet has gotten warmer in the last 20 years from dumping CO2 in the atmosphere because the temperature data has so many flaws that cannot be resolved without going back original sources and evaluating them. Have they secretly been reading wuwt?
i simply can’t help but notice that the industrialized world is completely covered by a low temperature indicator in this picture.
conclusion: 3rd world countries cause warming. so do polar bears and penquins…. deserts, rainforests and mountains.
only in the industrialized world do these horrid climate influences get ground down under pavement and the sanctity of cool weather protected.
Now. in all seriousness, i must comment that this is a telling admission from nasa. if i thought it was going to end up in the mainstream media i might even believe that it could make a difference in the way some people think.
i also must comment that i have seen little information about recreating earth conditions in a lab and tweaking the atmospheric mix. seems to me that might be a good starting point in developing theories about the effect of co2 on temperatures.
I don’t have a mynah on my birdfeeder. It’s a good thing because the mynah, a great mimic, would be laughing its poor self to death at the warmists defending the empirical temperature gathering network.
We have satellite data. I know Pielke talks about this subject but how well does global mean temperature compare between satellite and station data? How about radiosondes?
We know all measurements have some associated error but if we see generally agreement across different techniques that should give us some confidence. I guess one can always argue that brightness temperature algorithms were tweaked to look like station data but you cannot really tweak radiosondes. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
“NASA Data Worse Than Climate-Gate Data, GISS Admits”
Is that what NASA said?
Well no, but it’s a catchy headline.
FoxNews is shameless.
NASA has turned into a reflection of college campuses all across the world. Bizarre left wingers pretending to do real work while sucking on the tax payers teats. Fake science, fake brains. Can you imagine the stupidity in not knowing whether a navigational system rocketed to Mars is in Metric vs English? After 2 years of work? Or a lens that cost over a hundred million dollars to grind?
These people are political dolts that should be sent to a hardware store to finish their embarrassing “careers”. We are in the hands of morons that would rather extract money from people because of their “feelings” rather than their ability.
KTWO
“Off topic. What is going on with Arctic ice extent?”
Not of topic at all. The Map showing the warming anomaly in the Arctic is obviously correct because warming will increase ice coverage, just as it causes more snow. In fact it’s so warm in Northern Canada that all the ice roads are open.
Oh my gosh this is funny.
The British MPs took a huge bite out of the Climatologists’ culture of anti-scientific method secrecy and lack of transparency. Now NASA is admitting their reports were substandard. Even Anthony got a good plug for this work, that pried open a can of worms that they just couldn’t avoid.
What’s next, Alarmists adopting the Scientific Integrity backed by the Skeptics?
Stephen Skinner (22:21:45) :
Thanks for the explanation of how ice is caused by warmth. I’ll stick my ice tray in the microwave next time I need some fast cubes.
So three wrong answers must be correct because they are all similar answers? This must be the new politicaly correct scienctific methodology, or the post-normal scientific method.
And what, pray tell, is the raw data that is being used?
Is it the data as recorded and reported by each individual station to each country’s own official weather agency, without having been tweaked? Or is the data that’s being shared been so homogenized, pasteurized, & harmonized that it bears little semblance to the data as originally collected?
From everything I’ve seen of the quality of stations and the standards as well as the jerry-rigged nature of the assorted networks of stations, NOAA, NCDC, & GISS get a resounding F; perhaps it would be even more appropriate to give them an I, as in Incomplete.
Stephen Skinner: Thanks. I see it now.
Wren (22:04:34) :
“NASA Data Worse Than Climate-Gate Data, GISS Admits”
Is that what NASA said?
Well no, but it’s a catchy headline.
FoxNews is shameless
Tell me, Wren, what is incorrect about the headline? Ruedy admitted that the NCDC and CRU data was better than GISS, which is another way of saying that GISS data is not as good as NCDC or CRU data, or in non-pejorative terms, NCDC and CRU are a bit better, GISS is a little worse.
Well, at least you can attribute your dizzy perspective on all that spinning you do, which of course, is a kind of spin all on its own.
@Wren (22:04:34) :
From the article:
Emphasis mine.
NO DATA means NO DATA. Climatologists are trying to tease out a signal so small that the slightest bias introduced by extrapolation methodology will mimic apparent warming. Artificial data is artifact-laden. Add conscious or unconscious tweaking and cherry picking and the result is drivel instead of science.
The idea of a global surface temperature is faulty ab origine. Global heat is chaotic, transient, and partitioned between hemispheres and between sky and ocean. The ocean’s heat capacity is about 1200 times that of the atmosphere. Humidity and cloud variations unhinge any rational attempt at heat balance calculations. The four data sets aren’t worth spit. It’s a travesty.
What is the Arctic up to? 14,405,781 km2?
Is the Arctic crazy?
Steve Goddard (22:39:21) :
Stephen Skinner (22:21:45) :
Thanks for the explanation of how ice is caused by warmth. I’ll stick my ice tray in the microwave next time I need some fast cubes
=====
I don’t know if the mpemba effect will work that way, but it’s worth a try. Just be sure not to use a metal ice tray.