The “Climategate” scandal, which broke in November 2009, revealed
what many skeptics had privately suspected. Prominent climate
scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research
Unit (CRU) had collaborated to keep data out of skeptics’ hands,
subverted the peer review process, and used questionable methods
to construct the temperature record on which the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) based its
recommendations.
Now a new “Climategate” scandal is emerging, this time
based on documents released by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space
Studies (GISS) in response to several Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) suits filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).
The newly released emails further demonstrate the politicized
nature of climate science, revealing a number of questionable
practices that cast doubt on the credibility of scientific data
provided by NASA.
The emails reveal that GISS, like CRU, has done a poor job
of preserving and managing its data. Although there is no
evidence that GISS has destroyed its data, as CRU did in the late
1980s, Dr. Reto Ruedy of GISS admits in an email that “[The
United States Historical Climate Network] data are not routinely
kept up-to-date.” In another email, he reveals that NASA had
inflated its temperature data since 2000 on a questionable basis.
“[NASA’s] assumption that the adjustments made the older data
consistent with future data… may not have been correct,” he says.
“Indeed, in 490 of the 1057 stations the USHCN data were up to 1C
colder than the corresponding GHCN data, in 77 stations the data
were the same, and in the remaining 490 stations the USHCN data
were warmer than the GHCN data.”
Unfortunately, it seems that the discrepancy privately
highlighted by Dr. Ruedy was not coincidental, but part of a
broader pattern of misrepresentation on the part of GISS. Between
2002 and 2005, GISS chief James Hansen issued press releases
headlined “2005 Warmest Year in a Century;” “2006 was Earth’s
Fifth Warmest Year;” and “The 2002 meteorological year is the
second warmest year in the period of accurate instrumental data.”
In other words, global warming is happening and that immediate
action is necessary.
However, as Canadian researcher Steve McIntyre points out,
these releases were inconsistent with other NASA documents that
suggest that the warmest year in U.S. history was actually 1934.
In response to McIntyre, Hansen emailed Dr. Donald E. Anderson,
saying that, “If one wished to be scientific, instead of trying
to confuse the public … one should note that single year
temperatures for an area as small as the U.S. (2% of the globe)
are extremely noisy.” In a similar email to Dr. Anderson on
August 14, 2007, Hansen described the previously touted
temperature “records” as “minor,” “negligible,” and “less than
the uncertainty.”
In fact, further corrections revealed by the emails
indicate that U.S. temperatures on average had only increased by
0.5 degree Celsius since 1934, rather than 1 degree, as
originally claimed.
The released emails from both the University of East Anglia
and NASA illustrate how far the “scientific consensus” on climate
change has been politicized — to the point of unreliability.
Dependent on an alarmist atmosphere for continued government
funding, state-sponsored scientific organizations have a strong
incentive to hire ideologically committed partisans.
Taken together, these revelations all show that we actually
know much less about the workings of the climate than politicized
scientists and advocates like Al Gore say we do. Yet
virtually all calls to “action” to prevent climate change are
based on the belief that the extent to which greenhouse gases
have overwhelmed natural forces in affecting the climate is a
settled question.
Despite all this, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
is forging ahead with its politically motivated finding that
greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare and need to
be expensively regulated. Thankfully, as the evidence of the
bankruptcy of much of the “settled” climate science continues to
accumulate, public outcry may help bring this politically
motivated agenda to an end.
