Hansen and the Numbers

For years the global warming alarmists have insisted that we are already seeing the results of global warming. Almost all of the top ten hottest years occurred in the last decade. Now it turns out that this is not true, at least for the US. First I will describe what happened then what it really means.

As cities expand, they alter the local climate. This is known as urban heat island effect. you can feel it yourself - just walk across your yard and driveway on a hot day. Chances are really good that the driveway will be painfully hot as the cement absorbs and radiates heat. If you place a thermometer near the driveway,it will show the air as being warmer than over the grass.

There is a long-standing policy to fudge the data slightly in order to compensate for urban heat islands. Data from other weather stations that are in the wilderness is applied to the urbanized ones. NOAA does this in real time and forwards the results to NASA which then figures the national temperature.

The problem is that  NOAA stopped fudging the figures a few years ago and NASA didn't get the word. This meant that the effects of urbanization were introduced into the national temperature record which inflated the most recent readings.

A Canadian named Steve McIntyre noticed that the raw numbers looked strange. He sent a query to NASA and they discovered the difference in the numbers. After making the corrections, 1998 dropped from the hottest year in recorded US history to number two and the rest of the 1990s dropped out of the top ten.

So what does it mean? NASA's Goddard Institute says that the correction is meaningless because it only represents a tiny fraction of a degree and the US only represents 2% of the total surface of the Earth. I'll give them both of those butI see some other important implications.

The first is that the global warming hysteria machine has been using the incorrect numbers to insist that we are feeling the effects of global warming right here, right now. It's a harder sell tog et Americans to make most of the cuts when the effects are showing up elsewhere.

The next implication is that it might not be showing up elsewhere, either. The US is the only country that tries to filter out the effects of urban heat islands. Skeptics have long argued that urbanization was corrupting the figures and causing graphs to show warming where it is not.

Finally, there are the implications of NASA not noticing the error. The official guardian of the data is Dr. James Hansen. This is the same Dr. Hansen who first warned of global warming in 1988. It is impossible to know for sure but there is a good chance that he didn't notice the difference in the figures because he needed them to be correct. How many other figures have errors that went uncorrected because the results confirmed Hansen's or someone else's theories on global warming? There is no way to know.

NASA and Goddard should take a close look at all of the weather data currently being used to confirm that warming is happening. Without this, skeptcs like me can are justified in doubting the evidence.