After the scandal concerning the CRU at the University of East Anglia, this may be the sound of the second shoe dropping.
Data from the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City, both associated with the US Government and the UN’s IPCC, have come under fire from two researchers. Programmer E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologis Joseph D’Aleo have combed through the data and the programming from which conclusions were made about man-made global warming and claim the data used was both cherry-picked and manipulated to produce findings that supported the hypothesis that man was responsible for climate change.
For E. Michael Smith this project was quite a test of his computer programming skills. “Opening, unraveling and understanding what is happening in a complex FORTRAN computer code, with 20 years of age and change in it, is a difficult and grueling task,” he says, “and the deeper I dug the more amazing the details revealed. When doing a benchmark test of the program, I found patterns in the input data from NCDC that looked like dramatic and selective deletions of thermometers from cold locations.” Smith says after awhile, it became clear this was not a random strange pattern he was finding, but a well designed and orchestrated manipulation process. “The more I looked, the more I found patterns of deletion that could not be accidental. Thermometers moved from cold mountains to warm beaches; from Siberian Arctic to more southerly locations and from pristine rural locations to jet airport tarmacs. The last remaining Arctic thermometer in Canada is in a place called ‘The Garden Spot of the Arctic,’ always moving away from the cold and toward the heat. I could not believe it was so blatant and it clearly looked like it was in support of an agenda,” Smith says.
Here are the numbers behind the startling findings of the new research paper. The number of actual weather observation points used as a starting point for world average temperatures has been reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 in the most recent years. Still, more stations are dropped out in related programs and in the final NASA/GIStemp data file, it drops to about 1,000. That leaves much of the world unaccounted for,” says Joseph D’Aleo of ICECAP.us and SPPI.org, who has released a research study of the global temperature pattern today. “Think of it this way,” he continues, “if Minneapolis and other northern cities suddenly disappeared but Kansas City and St. Louis were still available, would you think an average of Kansas City and St. Louis would provide an accurate replacement for Minneapolis and expect to use that to determine how Minneapolis’ temperature has changed with any hope of accuracy?”
E. Michael Smith pointed out that the November 2009 “anomaly map” from GISS shows a very hot Bolivia, which is covered by high mountains. “One small problem: there have been no temperatures recorded in the NCDC data set for Bolivia since 1990. NASA/GISS have to fill in or make up the numbers from up to 1200km away. This is on the beach in Peru or in the Amazon jungle,” he said.
Given these revelations, and assuming they’re accurate, it calls into question the entire AGW hypothesis since the supporting data is apparently invalid. I have to wonder, other than the sound of crickets, what reaction Al Gore and the rest of the warmist cabal will have to say about this?