By Art Horn, Icecap Meteorologist

Members of Congress are asking something novel of NASA: to actually study space, not global warming. Representatives Bill Posey (R-FL), Sandy Adams (R-FL), Rob Bishop (R-UT) and others have sent a letter to House Appropriations Committee Chairman Harold Rogers (R-KY) and Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee Chairman Frank Wolf (R-VA) asking for NASA to launch their efforts in a new direction - the old one.

For many years, NASA has been spending vast sums of money to study global warming, despite the efforts already undertaken at other federal agencies where such research is more appropriate. The letter asks that NASA refocus on what it was created to do, which is to maintain and develop our space program.

The amount of money being spent to study global warming, as a percentage of NASA’s budget, is startling - especially when one considers this is not part of NASA’s original mission. In budget year 2010, NASA spent 7.5% of its funding - over $1B - to study global warming. On top of that - the vast majority of federal stimulus money given to NASA in 2010 was spent on studying global warming.

As a whole, the U.S. federal government has spent $8.7 billion dollars on global warming studies - just in the past year! Many of the sixteen separate agencies doing this work were performing redundant research. In a time of federal spending cuts that are sure to come, much of this redundancy certainly can and must be eliminated, saving taxpayers billions. Certainly NASA should be one of the first to see funding drastically cut, or eliminated entirely, in this area.

The principal arm of global warming research for NASA is the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). That’s “Space” Studies, not climate. The Institute is located in New York City on the campus of Columbia University. The homepage of GISS states:

Research at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) emphasizes a broad study of global change.

No mention of anything to do with space exploration. How odd. The overview continues:

...which is an interdisciplinary initiative addressing natural and man-made changes in our environment that occur on various time scales - from one-time forcings such as volcanic explosions, to seasonal and annual effects such as El Nino, and on up to the millennia of ice ages - and that affect the habitability of our planet.

Under the section titled “More Research News & Features,” there are seven different news items, all dealing with global warming. Nothing about space or manned space missions or anything at all up there. It’s as if GISS has launched itself into an entirely different orbit, unrelated to its founding documents. The Goddard Institute for Climate Studies would be a much more accurate representation, though I think Dr. Robert Goddard would be surprised to learn how much influence he must have had in the field of climate research, rather than in developing liquid fueled rockets.

The shift of the GISS research effort is mysterious, but so is the trend of their long-term temperature records. In the late 1990s, GISS published a graph of the United States yearly average temperature from 1880 to 1998. From the graph it is clear that 1934 is nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit warmer than 1998, a very substantial amount. In fact, the graph ranked the four warmest years in order as: 1934, 1921, 1931, and 1998. But by 2009, an updated version of the graph shows some dramatic and remarkable changes: 1934, 1921, and 1931 are all now cooler than 1998!

Somehow in the past decade, these three years that concluded seven or eight decades ago managed to cool themselves, and 1998 found a way to warm itself, despite this all requiring time travel and maybe a volcano and a second sun.

How could “climate change” of this nature and magnitude take place when the readings were already determined? Apparently GISS found a way to “adjust” the temperatures of the past and present, by “changing” them. The obvious result of the change is twofold. The warmest decade of the last 130 years in the United States, the 1930s, has been “cooled” to make the current time period appear warmer. Another result of the change is that the years after 1970 have been adjusted warmer, to make the slope of temperature rise since then appear steeper and more significant.

Not only is GISS studying global warming, they are actually creating it! I guess all those billions of dollars were enough to buy a few degrees here and there.

This interesting interpretation of temperature by GISS is not limited to the United States data. The differences between the GISS global average temperature and the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) satellite-derived average global temperature is revealing. Since 1998, the difference in the global temperature anomaly between GISS and UAH has increased to .72 degrees Fahrenheit, with GISS being the warmer. This difference is 70% of all the global warming anomaly since 1850! Some of this difference is due to the fact that GISS uses the period from 1951 to 1980 as its base period to calculate its anomalies. The period from 1945 to 1976 was a period of global cooling. By using this colder period as its base for calculating anomalies GISS gets larger warm temperature anomalies in its current evaluation of global temperature. The UAH uses the last 30 years as its base period.

As a consequence of these differences we get conflicting trends. The UAH data shows a decline of average global temperature of .34 degrees Fahrenheit during January 2011. On the other hand GISS found an increase of .27 degrees Fahrenheit during the same month. From March of 2010 to January 2011, UAH data shows a substantial global temperature drop of 1.01 degrees Fahrenheit. GISS was showing a downward trend in global temperature of 1.03 degrees Fahrenheit from March 2010 to December 2010, but then reversed the trend in January. It was almost as if GISS had enough of this temperature drop, and called a halt to it.

It appears that the climate in Washington is changing. We may see a significant drop in funding and a refocusing of NASA’s mission back to where it belongs, in space. The Goddard Institute for Data Adjustment may find that climate change does indeed have significant implications for the future, but those changes could be in a direction that GISS did not anticipate, and this time their attempts to change that direction may be out of their control.

See post.

Chris Woodward - OneNewsNow

The publisher of a website that advances the arguments of climate skeptics is criticizing a new grant that will allow schools to teach climate change.

High schools throughout Mississippi and Texas will soon be implementing material on climate change as part of a National Science Foundation’s (NSF) grant that includes a partnership between Mississippi State University, the University of Texas and Michigan State University.

Marc Morano, publisher of ClimateDepot.com and a former Republican staff member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, says this is merely another “recruiting tool to get children into the ideological spectrum.”

“You cannot look at the details of this grant and think that they’re actually going to be teaching legitimate climate science,” he contends. “They’re going to be teaching baseless computer model scares of what may happen to scare children...into activism and not educate them at all in science.”

In his opinion, that is “a very sad development,” because children used to view science, technology and innovation as exciting outlets that made them optimistic about the future. But now, “their science courses are being hijacked by talk of human extinction and all of this ecological catastrophe,” Morano laments.

The four-year project will begin this summer with training sessions, where instructors will be introduced to the materials they will incorporate in the classroom beginning in the 2012 academic year. Post.

As usual the mainstream media read only the summary page and so assumed NOAA cleared of all wrongdoing. But when you dig deeper....

Senator Inhofe Press Release

Washington, D.C.--Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, released the following findings from the investigation by the Commerce Department’s Inspector General on emails from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) related to the “climategate” scandal.

“I want to thank the Inspector General for conducting a thorough, objective, and balanced investigation,” Inhofe said.  “NOAA is one of the nation’s leading scientific organizations.  Unfortunately, in reading past the executive summary, this report shows that some NOAA employees potentially violated federal contract law and engaged in data manipulation.  It also appears that one senior NOAA employee possibly thwarted the release of important federal scientific information for the public to assess and analyze.  Her justification for blocking the release was contradicted by two career attorneys in the Office of General Counsel.  This is no doubt a serious matter that deserves further investigation. 

“Also, the IG recommended that certain NOAA-related emails ‘warrant further investigation,’ so I will be following up to ensure taxpayer dollars are being spent according to federal law, and that the public will get access to the science NOAA produces.”

Highlights from the IG Report

Emails ‘Warrant Further Investigation’

“We found eight emails which, in our judgment, warranted further examination to clarify any possible issues involving the scientific integrity of particular NOAA scientists or NOAA’s data. As a result, we conducted interviews with the relevant NOAA scientists regarding these eight emails, and have summarized their responses and explanations in the enclosure.”

Potential Breach of NOAA Contracting

“In addition to the foregoing, we also found two other emails that raised questions, one regarding a 2002 contract NOAA awarded to the CRU...”

“This email, dated June 24, 2003, captioned ‘NOAA Funding,’ was sent by a visiting fellow at CRU, a NOAA contractor, to another researcher (affiliated with a research institution in Vietnam) stating the following:

‘NOAA want[s] to give us more money for the El Nino work with IGCN [Indochina Global Change Network). How much do we have left from the last budget? I reckon most has been spent but we need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip [name omitted] didn’t make and also thec fees/equipment/computer money we haven’t spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious.’

“Auditing NOAA’s contracting with CRU was not within the scope of our inquiry, but in light of these circumstances it is important for NOAA to be assured that CRU fully complied with the applicable U.S. contracting rules and requirements.  Moreover, NOAA could not tell us the universe of climate-related contracts it has issued over the past ten years to parties and institutions such as CRU.” [Emphasis added]

NOAA Administrator’s Congressional Testimony

Dr. Lubchenco’s testimony before the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming: “The [CRU] emails really do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus and the independent scientific analyses of thousands of scientists around the world that tell us that the earth is warming and that the warming is largely a result of human activities.”

“Dr. Lubchenco told us she could not be sure whether she had read any of the CRU emails or received a briefing from her staff on the results of NOAA’s CRU email review prior to testifying before the House Select Committee.” [Emphasis added]

Thwarting FOIA

“The Co-Chair of the IPCC AR4 WG1, who was the only NOAA scientist informed of any of the aforementioned FOIA requests, told us that she did not conduct a ‘comprehensive search’ for and forward potentially responsive documents for agency processing. This was based, in part, on her understanding that her IPCC-related work product was the property of the IPCC, due to the confidentiality provisions contained in many of the documents.  In addition, she reportedly received verbal guidance from her supervisor and a NOAA OGC attorney that the IPCC-related documents she had created and/or obtained while on “detail” assignment to the IPCC did not constitute NOAA records.” [Emphasis added]

“We interviewed the two NOAA OGC attorneys whom the Co-Chair and her supervisor referenced during their interviews with us to determine what, if any, advice the attorneys provided to these individuals. Both attorneys specifically told us that they had not advised the Co-Chair or her supervisor on this matter at the time NOAA received the FOIA requests referenced herein. One attorney said that he never spoke to the Co-Chair about that issue, while the second attorney told us that he was consulted only after NOAA had already responded to the FOIA requesters that it had no responsive documents.” [Emphasis added]

“Based on our interviews of the two NOAA OGC attorneys, we followed-up with the Co-Chair and her supervisor, both of whom again told us that their handling of the aforementioned FOIA requests was based on advice they had received from these two specific attorneys. We requested from the Co-Chair and her supervisor documentation of any discussions with the NOAA OGC attorneys on this matter, which they were unable to provide. As such, we were unable to reconcile the divergent accounts.” [Emphasis added]

Questions about ‘Objectivity’

“Both the Chief Scientist and the creator of the image told us it was meant to bring some levity to the constant criticism that they and their fellow climate scientists were facing at the time from ‘climate skeptics.’ Notwithstanding their rationale, such an image could foster an adverse appearance about the scientists’ objectivity, and at least one internet blog questioned the propriety of the image. While none of the senior NOAA officials we interviewed said they were aware of the referenced email and the attached picture before we interviewed them, Dr. Lubchenco told us that ‘it was in bad taste.’ According to NOAA, both scientists, who acknowledged that the image was inappropriate, have since been counseled by their respective supervisors.” [Emphasis added]

For much more detail on the Chief Scientist, the attorneys and the FOIA requests see Climate Audit post (Solomon’s Divergence Problem’. See more today about how NOAA Misrepresented IG report.