From a Judicial watch press release
NASA Scientists Go on Attack After Climate Data Error Exposed
Contact Information: Press Office 202-646-5172, ext 305
Washington, DC — January 14, 2010
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained internal documents from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) related to a controversy that erupted in 2007 when Canadian blogger Stephen McIntyre exposed an error in NASA’s handling of raw temperature data from 2000-2006 that exaggerated the reported rise in temperature readings in the United States. According to multiple press reports, when NASA corrected the error, the new data apparently caused a reshuffling of NASA’s rankings for the hottest years on record in the United States, with 1934 replacing 1998 at the top of the list.
These new documents, obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), include internal GISS email correspondence as NASA scientists attempted to deal with the media firestorm resulting from the controversy. In one exchange GISS head James Hansen tells a reporter from Bloomberg that NASA had not previously published rankings with 1998 atop the list as the hottest year on record in the 20th century.
Email from Demian McLean, Bloomberg to Jim Hansen, August 14, 2007: “The U.S. figures showed 1998 as the warmest year. Nevertheless, NASA has indeed newly ranked 1934 as the warmest year…”
Email Response from James Hansen to Damian McLean, August 14, 2007: “…We have not changed ranking of warmest year in the U.S. As you will see in our 2001 paper we found 1934 slightly warmer, by an insignificant hair over 1998. We still find that result. The flaw affected temperatures only after 2000, not 1998 and 1934.”
Email from NASA Scientist Makiko Sato to James Hansen, August 14, 2007: “I am sure I had 1998 warmer at least once on my own temperature web page…” (Email includes temperature chart dated January 1, 2007.)
(This issue also crops up in email communications with New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin a little over a week later.)
According to the NASA email, NASA’s incorrect temperature readings resulted from a “flaw” in a computer program used to update annual temperature data.
Hansen, clearly frustrated by the attention paid to the NASA error, labeled McIntyre a “pest” and suggests those who disagree with his global warming theories “should be ready to crawl under a rock by now.” Hansen also suggests that those calling attention to the climate data error did not have a “light on upstairs.”
“This email traffic ought to be embarrassing for NASA. Given the recent Climategate scandal, NASA has an obligation to be completely transparent with its handling of temperature data. Instead of insulting those who point out their mistakes, NASA scientists should engage the public in an open, professional and honest manner,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
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Here’s a large package of emails from NASA GISS in one large PDF with 215 page which I’ve made available on the WUWT server which can handle the traffic this is likely to get.
783_NASA_docs (warning large PDF 11 MB)
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Slightly off topic. I did not realise how compromised Wikipedia has become. I just looked up ‘Ice Age’, and they have rewritten it to blame CO2 levels for ALL of the Earth’s previous climate! And of course mankind ‘from the earliest farmers’.
Amusing or sickening – not sure which.
N ever
A
S traight
A nswer
Hansen and his GISS buddy should be put on trial and sent to jail for Fraud, Waste and Abuse!
That type of arrogant, insulting tone is not befitting for someone who draws his salary from public funds.
Arrogance is not an unknown character flaw among engineers. I have been accused of it more than once myself (there is more than some truth to the allegation).
What matters is honesty. Scrupulous honesty. Uncompromising honesty.
With honesty (in matters of engineering and science) many other character flaws can be over looked. Mistakes must be admitted (I’m very scrupulous about that). Why? Well for one thing it hurts. And pain reprograms the neural network.
To be good at science and engineering you have to love the pain of being wrong as much as you love the pleasure of being right. Otherwise error cascades.
SteveSadlov (17:15:44) :
NASA and children? How about this?
http://climate.nasa.gov/kids/
Progressives destroy everything they touch 🙁
When I saw this I wanted to cry.
From inspiring children to pursue science and achievement in my generation to brainwashing the children to pursue myth and mediocrity in this generation. BTW, I have been noticing the problem with ridiculous press releases from NASA since 1998 or so. I thought that they were just signs of isolated rot, but recently I came to the realization that its reached the brain.
How about this work of US tax paid propaganda:
http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/whatonearth
Have these guys no shame?
NCDC data is for the US, HadCRUT is global (I think).
Baby, it’s cold outside. There is no better wake up call for the general population than very real suffering, on a personal level. I can hear all the liberals screaming, “I didn’t know they meant me!”
I think this kind of thing (1934 vs 1998 “race”) is exactly what makes certain people hopeful that tomorrow they will wake up to find that Al Gore has won the 2000 election.
Actually, this “race” reminds me quite a bit of the end of the movie Cars, which was just as back and forth and just as exciting. Especially when we find out that what, 2005 comes out of nowhere and wins!!! (Hope I didn’t spoil that for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie.)
If raw data isn’t good enough (and with UHI for one, it isn’t), then we really do need to own up to things and say we move these temps around all the time and thus have not come up with a solid methodology. Which would follow that we do not really know how many years we have left, whether 4 or 400 or 4M.
Dr. Bob:
What I don’t understand is this: How do we reconcile that 1934 was warmer than 1998 with our current temperature graphs? For instance, this from the HadCRUT3 data set:
[Global Mean Graph]
Dr. Bob, the 1934 vs 1998 problem relates only to the U.S..
I’d like to also note that Steve McIntyre’s discovery of the NASA Y2K bug demonstrates again that the real “Peer Review” starts after a paper or even a temperature graph is published. Before Climate Science came along it had probably never even been imagined that a few peer reviewers would be sufficient to establish the reliability of a study or result, much less the “given truth”. At least as far as I knew.
Good thing, too, that Anthony, enc., reviewed the surface stations! No one else cared. Why didn’t University departments of Climate Science or Meteorology wonder about it, especially after Anthony took up the task and started getting some pretty funny results?
Fiction:
Newly discovered email from J Hansen to S McKintyre:
Thank you for pointing out the error. Our rigorous QA procedures failed us on this isolated occurrence. You can be sure we have rigorous archiving procedures which include all data and codes.
I would like to point out to you that I have never described you as not having a light on upstairs, being an old contrarian full of malarkey or that you should crawl under a rock.
Thank you once a gain for pointing out the error. Be sure we will issue a corrigendum to the paper and will acknowledge your assistance in this matter.
Please feel free to ask for any of our data or codes as we are an open and transparent publicly-funded organisation and welcome independent verification and replication of our very important work.
With warmest regards,
James Hansen
Anthony,
For an pertinent but less insightful read, I strongly suggest
you take a look at:
http://governmentattic.org/docs/FOIA_Logs_NASA-HQ_FY2005-07.pdf
This 133 page PDF format list contains the summary of NASA FOIA request logs from their FY05 through FY07 (early December 2008).
Up until early 2008, the NASA reseachers can’t claim to have been
bombarded by time-consuming FOIA requests.
Well… they can claim it, but it would be untrue.
This old layman has had doubts about global warming for the last couple of years. Nothing scientific about that; I simply haven’t detected any general warming in the seventy something years that I have been around. Like nearly all old Rhodesians, my children, grandchildren and great grandchild, are scattered around the world: Britain, Australia and the U.S. None of them have sensed any general warming in their various locations.
I am quite capable of doing my own statistical analysis but I could only do that to my own, and anybody elses’ satisfaction, if I could lay my hands on impeccable data that is truly representative, tolerably accurately measured, and covering a very long period of time. It now appears to me, that, as I have increasingly come to suspect, there is no such data in existence.
Consequently I am now waiting for you scientific types, who mostly seem to accept that some degree of warming is a fact, to convince me that there has been any warming at all since 1935. Come on chaps, if you believe there has been any warming at all, please convince Great Granddad.
Ken Harvey (01:52:21) :
Well grandad, I can tell you with some confidence that it has been getting quite HOT at both CRU East Anglia and GISS NASA.
The staff there tell my fly on the wall that things have been hotting-up since about Nov. 2009
There’s a lot of froth coming out in this blog.
To me there’s only one question to be asked:
‘Why did the two temperature comparisons change so many times and what technical manipulations caused that to happen?’
Only then can it be determined what was going on and what the judicious interpretation of all the changes might be.
IMHO.
“”
dfbaskwill (14:33:48) :
No wonder there are still those who swear we were never on the moon!
“”
Only the ones trying to sell something to the gullable recreational pharmeceutical types. For those that lived in the era, sending 3 guys up in a sardine can powered by a rocket using kerosine was a whole lot more believable than trying to do special effects with an ibm 360. Any sci-fi movie special effects of that era proves the point.
Of course now it’s the 911 towers that couldn’t have collapsed because it’s inconvenient politically for imbiciles that can’t tell the difference between ‘run’ and ruin’ and think they know better how to ‘run’ our lives than we and are clueless about the loss of material strength for steel when heated. They probably never heard of such a thing as a blacksmith.
[Allowed through, but no 911 discussion here please. RT – mod]
Love this email exchange:
Andy Revkin: “Do you agree that we should be doing alot more to improve surface temperature tracking. I never, til today, visited surface stations.org and it is quite amazing. If our stations are that shoddy, what’s it like in Mongolia?”
Hansen’s complacent reply: “When there are several thousand stations it’s easy to find what seem like a huge number of stations with problems”.
EPA JOB KILLING QUEST WON’T PAUSE TO EVALUATE CORRUPTED SCIENCE OR EVEN RESPOND TO CONGRESSIONAL INQUIRIES:
http://republicans.oversight.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=503:epa-job-killing-quest-wont-pause-to-evaluate-corrupted-science-or-even-to-respond-to-congressional-inquiries&catid=27:latest-news
My first reaction after looking at the numbers table, with one column decreasing over time, the other increasing over time, is:
“what other data has this been done to?”
sea ice or other data that alarmists point to? i’m not accusing, just wondering.
Seriously folks, does anyone believe that we know the real average temperature over the country to within .1 degree C?
Concerning these FOIA’d emails
I noticed the WUWT surfacestation reference in the NASA emails as provided to Judicial Watch. The email was an exchange between Hansen and Revkin. This can be found on pages 111 – 112.
Revkin pointed out the surfacestation.org and …”found it quite amazing.”
Note that Hansen replies “When there are thousands of stations it is easy to find what seem like a huge number of stations with problems”.
I thought the station count dropped to a singular thousand stations which increased the concentration of those with a UHI issue.
James Chamberlain (06:24:34) :
My first reaction after looking at the numbers table, with one column decreasing over time, the other increasing over time, is:
“what other data has this been done to?”
sea ice or other data that alarmists point to? i’m not accusing, just wondering.
Try looking at Sea Level, they have extropolated Metres of sea rise when there are only Cms.
@Clawga – I thought the station count dropped to a singular thousand stations which increased the concentration of those with a UHI issue.
Not to mention decreasing the number of stations representing high elevations or far north or south latitudes.
Is it just me or is it taking GISTemp an unusually long time to release their Dec GMST anomaly value?
It’d be just great if all science could attain the degree of intellectual purity of cryptography. A researcher who finds a flaw in a cryptographic method gets instant fame and adulation instead of being humiliated, marginalized, ejected, fired, defunded, tenure denied, character assassinated, ridiculed, harassed, shouted down…
“Is it just me or is it taking GISTemp an unusually long time to release their Dec GMST anomaly value?”
Probably because given the current weather they realize nobody would believe the December numbers they made up last June. They have to make up all new numbers now……