By the Boston Herald Editorial Staff
The latest wrinkle in the global-warming controversy finds the National Aeronautics and Space Administration quietly correcting its historical data to compensate for an earlier error, a correction that should deflate some of the recent panic-mongering about an apparently warming Earth.
The correction reduced the average temperatures for 2000-2006 in the continental United States by about 0.27 degrees Fahrenheit (with many stations showing lower readings and many showing readings much above average). That dethroned 1998 as the hottest year on record, a distinction in the NASA data set that now belongs to 1934 (by an insignificant margin over 1998). Several other recent hot years were moved down in the rankings, and the 1930s now account for four of the top 10.
The number changes don’t greatly affect worldwide averages - but they reveal a disturbing arrogance among scientists in the community of global-warming true believers.
The data-handling error - the assumption that one set of numbers was identical to another when it was not - was discovered by Canadian researcher Steve McIntyre, who notified NASA on Aug. 4. NASA almost immediately corrected its Web site, but without any notice of the changes. You can bet that if the correction had shifted the data the other way, there would have been press releases, news conferences and lugubrious music on the TV news. As it was, it was left to the conservative blogosphere to spread the word; the mainstream media ignored the episode.
That’s not the worst of it. NASA refused to release to McIntyre the computer codes it used to make the correction, though a huge amount of the agency’s other climate codes are online. McIntyre believes there are “real and interesting statistical issues” involved in the records of the observing stations on which NASA relies, issues of whether the proper corrections have been made for the well-known “heat island” effects of urban areas. Read the full editorial here.
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Bad News for Science in Newsweek
The Third International Mathematics and Science Study Results reveals that US public school children are remarkably sub par in math and science capabilities. Apparently things are not much brighter for the adults at Newsweek Magazine. See full story here.
The “Unruly Sunne” cannot be ruled out as a Cause of Recent Climate Variation
On July 10, 2007, the Royal Society, one of the oldest scientific institutions in the world, published Recent oppositely-directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature by Lockwood and Frohlich . In the web-page of the journal (Fig. 1), the Society calls the paper “The truth about global warming!” and says, “The sun is not a factor in recent climate change!” See full story here.
A Critique on the Lockwood/Frochlich Paper in the Royal Society Proceedings
Mike Lockwood and Claus Frohlich published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society which concludes that the Sun could not be responsible for the global temperature rise over the last twenty years. The BBC published a news story on the paper dated July 10, 2007. See full story here.
Poor Form—Comments on the Minneapolis Bridge Collapse
Apparently, some people know no boundaries for indecency. Take Joseph Romm for instance. Romm, a former member of the Clinton administration, claimed Monday that global warming might have played a factor in the collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis last week. See full story here.
Scientific Alliance Newsletter, August 17, 2007
The environmental movement has achieved much over the last few decades. Much of this can be dated from the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, and the formation of Greenpeace in 1971 marks the effective birth of organised, high profile activism. From these beginnings, in less than half a century, environmentalism has become mainstream. In the industrialised world, air and water quality has improved tremendously, recycling rates have steadily improved, and European farmers are paid for conservancy work rather than just growing food. By any standards, this degree of change is a major achievement.
But successful organisations don’t just fold when they have achieved their aims: they find new causes and new goals. Having established their influence, they are loathe to lose it.
Big Environmentalism represents vested interests every bit as much as does the business lobby. Their motives may be different but they are no purer. At heart, they want power and influence so that they can shape policy to their liking. They are politicians by any other name, but they remain unelected. Despite the good things the movement has helped to achieve in the past, their influence now is surely too strong if we want rational, balanced policymaking to be the norm. Read more here.