By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow

Though it doesn’t rank with the Bernie Madhoff’s Ponzi scheme, it is nonetheless criminal at a time when important decisions are about to be made that will affect our way of living and economic well-being.

According to a NOAA Press Release yesterday, NCDC’s ranking of 2008 as ninth warmest if expected trends continue compares to a similar ranking of ninth warmest based on an analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The NASA analysis indicates that the January-November global temperature was 0.76 degree F (0.42 degree C) above the 20th century mean. The NOAA and NASA analyses differ slightly in methodology, but both use data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center - the federal government’s official source for climate data.

Don’t believe a word of it. UAH MSU satellite data suggest 2008 will end up about the 15th warmest (16th coldest) in their 30 years of lower tropospheric data. The NASA, NOAA and Hadley data bases are seriously contaminated and the agencies are intentionally ignoring the issues as they are agenda driven with inflated budgets because of the alleged global warming.

NOAA has actually gone as far as to pull out the urbanization (urban heat island or UHI) adjustment from the US data and there is very little to no urban adjustment made to the global data based on the flawed papers by Peterson and Parker which suggest UHI has little effect on global trends. Ignored are the many other papers from some of the worlds best climatologists worldwide that suggest it produces significant contamination.

Add to that the fact that more than 2/3rds of the world’s stations (most rural) have dropped out and or are often missing monthly data, 69% of the first nearly 600 US stations evaluated by Anthony Watts surface stations.org are poor or very poorly sited with only 4% meeting official standards and no changes were made for the known biases of new instrumentation.

Not less than half a dozen peer reviewed papers have suggested the warming is exaggerated by up to 50%. This would put 2008 somewhere nearer the middle of the pack of the 114+ years in the global data bases not near the top. It also belies the claim that the 10 warmest years have occurred in the last dozen years. Read more here on the important data integrity issue.

See larger image here.