Global Warming Darling James Hansen, Y2K and Bad Assumptions

You probably have not heard, but climate scientist Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit has identified a major error in the James Hansen's surface temperature data set. A bit of the dirty details: Hansen and his colleagues...especially those eager to be on the forefront of the Global Warming...adjust the basic temperature records. We call it faith-based climate science. They call it normalizing the records to account for bad data and siting problems (many sites do not meet even minimal compliance standards). Hansen developed software to “fix” the defects in the surface sites. That makes his adjustments faith-based as the scientists do not believe that Hansen has any obligation to provide anything other than a cursory description of his software or, for that matter, the software itself. Trust us, in other words.

Which gets back to the problem that Hansen and his colleague have now admitted exists in respect to what are called USHCN and GISS adjustments. GISS adjustments come out Hansen's shop and is in question. USHCN (U.S. Historical Climatology Network) raw and adjusted data are from NOAA, the keeper of the data sets. Note the first two graphs below which represent pre-adjustment and post-adjustment temperatures. Note the ominous warming trend in the 1990s? It's an artifact of Hansen's magic adjustment algorithm.

The second graph below represents the difference between the two. No small change.

Four of the top 10 are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the on the list, behind even 1900. Most importantly, according to the GISS, 1998 is no longer the warmest year in American history. That honor once again belongs to 1934.

Al Gore's poster child, James Hansen made changes to the data which supported their claim of accelerated Global Warming...and got caught. Imagine that.