From The American Spectator: CEI Suing NASA Over Climate Stonewall
By Chris Horner on 5.27.10 @ 10:57AM
This morning in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the Competitive Enterprise Institute is filing suit against NASA, calling the erstwhile space agency to account for its nearly three-year stonewall of access to internal documents exposing an abuse of taxpayer funds to advance the global warming agenda.
Along the way to this point, we have begun revealing how NASA is running a third-party advocacy website out of NASA facilities, at taxpayer expense, to assail “skeptics” and promote the highly suspect basis for a specific policy agenda.
This campaign also helped to elevate the particular fiefdom in question (James Hansen’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, or GISS) in terms of budget and stature. It has also elevated the scientists involved, professionally, at the expense of the taxpayer they are working to stick with the biggest economic intervention in our history (one I detail in my new book “Power Grab“).
In this process, if only thanks to pressure on NASA after a December 2009 news story about their games, we have already obtained important emails among 2,000 or so pages released. These include an admission to USA Today’s weather editor that NASA GISS is just a modeling office, using the temperature record of …CRU, the ClimateGate outfit. That means their “independent temperature record” is actually a recapitulation of one that …doesn’t exist, but was withdrawn as a result of ClimateGate when the custodians admitted they actually lost all original data.
more at The American Spectator: CEI Suing NASA Over Climate Stonewall
Probably way off topic, but here’s my own take on the field:
Chris Horner seems somewhat confused about the nature of GISTemp. It uses GHCN, USHCN, and Antarctic stations for land temps and Reynolds/HadISSTv1 for ocean temps.
HadCRUT, on the other hand, uses its own set of stations (including most stations in GHCN) for land temps, and uses HadSSTv2 for ocean temps.
The insinuation that:
Rock on CEI!!!!
These crooks need taking down. And the government whilst you’re at it.
Moderator: looks like I broke the html in my prior comment. It should have been:
Chris Horner seems somewhat confused about the nature of GISTemp. It uses GHCN, USHCN, and Antarctic stations for land temps and Reynolds/HadISSTv1 for ocean temps.
HadCRUT, on the other hand, uses its own set of stations (including most stations in GHCN) for land temps, and uses HadSSTv2 for ocean temps.
The insinuation that:
“”their “independent temperature record” is actually a recapitulation of one that …doesn’t exist, but was withdrawn as a result of ClimateGate when the custodians admitted they actually lost all original data.”
is truly bizarre. Its not to hard to take the various databases used and replicate GISTemp: http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j237/hausfath/Picture416.png
I hope there is not a short statute of limitations in the US, as there apparently is in England. It would be a shame to see these folks get off because of their actions.
Gavin Schmidt may have some time this weekend. They are very busy blogging. I am sure they have been deleting records and files. Lisa Jackson at the EPA said to not keep correspondence or records.
Maybe Zeke that is just the point. Think about it.
Have some of the principals on the side of AGW been separated at birth? Does AGW climatology have some special appeal for dorky looking bald guys like Hansen, Mann, Romm, and Gavin Schmidt? They all look as if they’re related
Zeke at 9:55 am,
Zeke, woe be it for me to put words in anyone else’s mouth, but I think a more correct way to phrase what he is saying would be:
…..these include an admission that NASA GISS is just a modeling office, and contrary to their assertion of having an “independent temperature record”, we now know they are using the temperature record of CRU, whoes custodians admitted they actually lost all original data, which means the NASA GISS “independent temperature record” actually doesn’t exist.
Gavin Schmidt is such an incredible weasel. That picture does him no justice – you really need to watch video of him to fully observe his snake oil salesmanship.
Maybe the Schmidtbird will be forced to sing!!
NASA has a lot of explaining to do.
http://climate.nasa.gov/kids/bigQuestions/climateChanging/
Poor Polar Bear.
I don’t know why this stuff is not getting any more attention, but NASA deliberately telling our children lies is a big deal.
Zeke,
I think the “insinuation” is based on the fact that it has been popular among Gavin and others to argue that there are many (or at least 4) independent temperature records that all provide similar data. However, recent climategate revelations and related questions in subsequent interviews have revealed that all the major databases include at least some of the same data, and that the claims of independence have, at the very least, been greatly exaggerated.
What is truly bizarre (to borrow your phrase) is that the climate science community seems not to realize that this is a problem, particularly when it seems that the further we dig into the details about these databases, the more reasons we find to doubt their reliability. I have asked on RealClimate and in other places whether the raw data, algorithms by which it has been adjusted, annotated computer programs used to apply the algorithms, and annotations indicating the detailed reasons and justifications for each adjustment are publicly available. No one has indicated that this critical information is available for any of the major databases, and most comments I have seen suggest that it is not only not publicly available, but that it probably cannot be retrieved in an intelligible form at all. Certainly, “Harry’s” efforts to sort out such information from the CRU data, as revealed in a Climategate document, does not inspire confidence in the climate record.
Imagine the FDA considering approval of a drug based on a spreadsheet that did not include the raw data, but data that was normalized and adjusted. What would the FDA response be when told, we cannot determine exactly how the data were adjusted or why, but we are sure the people who did it were trustworthy and qualified? I think we all know what the response would be and should be.
If you can show me that all the information listed above is readily available for any of the major data sets, I will be happy to eat public crow. If not, the whole climate science community needs to wake up and start offering major mea culpas. Until this occurs, my opinion of the standards of scientific rigor in this field and the reliability of its conclusions will remain very, very low.
The last paragraph is just weird, and probably indicates that the author is not familiar with the land surface records at all. GISTemp has nothing to do with CRU or its record-keeping. GISS gets most of its land surface data from NOAA, and that’s all available to everybody. And if you really don’t like the numbers NOAA has, you can trace that data back to a step before them, if you’re willing to go to the library and go through the old record archive books, or if you want to sit there looking up CLIMAT reports online for the more recent data.
As Zeke says, you can go to NOAA, get the raw data for yourself, and recreate GISTEMP for yourself.
God Bless the CEI!
Let the Rule Of Law prevail, across our troubled land and around the globe!
1. The Laws of the United States
2. The Laws of Physics
3. The Laws of Chemistry
4. The Laws of Thermodynamics
5. The Fundamental Laws Of Honest Humanity
– Do not lie.
– Do not cheat.
– Do not steal.
I am revolted beyond sufficiency of words by the profound intellectual dishonesty exhibited by the Global Warming cadres, from lowest dissembling acolyte to high priests of hot air, et.al…..
All this is about GLOBAL GOVERNANCE these GISS guys are after, so this is a must read:
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/climate-policy/science-and-policy/ray-evans-quadrant-Copenhagen-march-2010.pdf
The UNFCCC’s COP 15, or Copenhagen as it was generally called, was supposed to
create a post-Kyoto world of decarbonisation (the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012).
This new world order would be created by means of a binding treaty in which the
nation states which now comprise the world’s polity were to surrender their
sovereignty in all matters involving the use of carbon-based energy. Since civilisation
in the West, since the mid-C19, has been based on the increasing use of energy for
our domestic, industrial and commercial life, and particularly for the transport of
goods and people within states and between them, and since the overwhelming
proportion of this energy comes from burning fossil fuels, notably coal, this new
world order, which we can describe as the Green Empire or Imperium Viridis, would
supplant the nation state as the basis of the world’s polity.
Who is funding the CEI project for FOIA requests to NASA?
REPLY: I don’t know what the total makeup is, there are a lot of independent donations, I do know that. But I also know it won’t matter what the answer is, as you’ll simply write another hate filled post and blame “deniers” and “big oil”. Your MO precedes you. Blogging on school time and their network today? Tsk.
You can read their about page here http://cei.org/about
-A
GISS revised temps.
Stephen Pruett,
If Climategate provided a revelation that all land temp reconstructions use GHCN data, well, folks sure must not have been paying much attention for the prior few decades :-p
GISTemp doesn’t exactly try to hide the fact on their website…
“The current analysis uses surface air temperatures measurements from the following data sets: the unadjusted data of the Global Historical Climatology Network (Peterson and Vose, 1997 and 1998), United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) data, and SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) data from Antarctic stations. The basic analysis method is described by Hansen et al. (1999), with several modifications described by Hansen et al. (2001) also included.”
Ed Darrel – Why don’t you ask CEI ?
REPLY: That’s why I gave him the “About” link. His MO though is to make some comment here, then write about the answer, whatever it is. Ed is a lot like Romm, he usually makes a weekly rant against “deniers”. It’s kind of like Friday afternoons in Tehran, always predictable. -A
carrot eater says:
May 27, 2010 at 11:23 am
Haha! Yeah, right. Nice try. You find “corrected data” only from any of these charlatans, and numbers that incredibly coincide with each other across agencies around the world. As the old saying goes, “one lies and the next swears to it”. BUT, no algorithms for the corrections, no raw sources, etc. Jones and Mann have said, “the dog ate the data”. That isn’t going to work anymore.
Hence the reason for the FOIs, and the lawsuits, many more I hope, going forward. There is merit in this lawsuit on many grounds, and the judges involved agreed to the merit or they would not allow the case.
More than a civil case, IMHO, these are criminal fraud cases, beyond any shadow of a doubt. Virginia courts, as the first of many states that will eventually jump on the bandwagon (much like the tobacco lawsuits), will soon ferret these weasels out, under criminal and civil penalties.
Zeke said …
“Chris Horner seems somewhat confused about the nature of GISTemp. It uses GHCN, USHCN, and Antarctic stations for land temps and Reynolds/HadISSTv1 for ocean temps.
“HadCRUT, on the other hand, uses its own set of stations (including most stations in GHCN) for land temps, and uses HadSSTv2 for ocean temps.”
Chris Horner is not giving an opinion, he is referencing a NASA e-mail in which the writer tells a “USA Today’s weather editor that NASA GISS is just a modeling office, using the temperature record of …CRU, the ClimateGate outfit.” This e-mail will, doubtless, be featured in the lawsuit.
When the “experts” at NASA make astonishing blunders, you focus on the person exposing them. Hmmm. Were have we seen this before?
Suck it up. This is just the beginning, so you might as well get used to it. Before this has played out, NASA, NASA GISS, NOAA, CRU, and the rest will be permanently, laughably infamous.
@ur momisugly carrot eater
You’re almost correct, but NOAA doesn’t get most of it’s temps from CLIMAT, rather, they get it from GHCN. See here, http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ghcn/ghcngrid.html#development
As I understand it, HadCrut uses GHCN also. While GHCN allows a FTP download, they’ve already mucked with it before one gets to see it. I quote from the page with the FTP download instructions……….”GHCN homogeneity adjusted data was the primary source for developing the gridded fields. In grid boxes without homogeneity adjusted data, GHCN raw data was used to provide additional coverage when possible. “……………………………nice, they used raw data when forced to.
Whether GHCN uses CLIMAT or not, I really couldn’t say, because, well, GHCN didn’t say. I believe the point in the suit is: we were told, once, that various independent data sets all confirmed similar findings. (Dramatic global temp increase) As one digs away, we’re finding that there weren’t so many “independent” data sets, rather, the same temps mucked with in a different manner to get the same results.
carrot eater says:
May 27, 2010 at 11:23 am
The last paragraph is just weird, and probably indicates that the author is not familiar with the land surface records at all. GISTemp has nothing to do with CRU or its record-keeping. GISS gets most of its land surface data from NOAA, and that’s all available to everybody. And if you really don’t like the numbers NOAA has, you can trace that data back to a step before them, if you’re willing to go to the library and go through the old record archive books, or if you want to sit there looking up CLIMAT reports online for the more recent data.
As Zeke says, you can go to NOAA, get the raw data for yourself, and recreate GISTEMP for yourself.
Which has been done:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/
and the results are worse than we thought.