December 7, 2009
What's become known as "Climategate" may be about to explode on this side of the pond as well. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has threatened a lawsuit against NASA if by year-end the agency doesn't honor his Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for information on how and why its climate numbers have been consistently adjusted for errors.
"I assume that what is there is highly damaging," says Horner, who suspects, based on the public record, the same type of data fudging, manipulation and suppression that has occurred at Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). "These guys (NASA) are quite clearly determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this."
They may have good reason, says Investor's Business Daily (IBD):
- NASA was caught with its thermometers down when James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, announced that 1998 was the country's hottest year on record, with 2006 the third hottest.
- NASA and Goddard were forced to correct the record in 2007 to show that 1934, decades before the advent of the SUV, was in fact the warmest; in fact, the new numbers showed that four of the country's 10 warmest years were in the 1930s.
- Hansen, who began the climate scare some two decades ago, was caught fudging the numbers again in declaring October 2008 the warmest on record.
- This despite the fact that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
- Scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on that October's readings at all; figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
Was Hansen, like his CRU counterpart Michael Mann, trying to "hide the decline" in temperatures, asks IBD?
Hansen has said in the past that "heads of major fossil-fuel companies who spread disinformation about global warming should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature." What penalties would he recommend for himself and his CRU colleagues, asks IBD?
Source: Editorial, "NASA-Gate," Investor's Business Daily, December 7, 2009.
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