Global Fudging

Over the past year, the press is starting to report that there are people -- sane people -- who are skeptical about whether man-made carbon gas is warming the planet, or even whether the planet is now warming at all, and that evidence exists to support their claims.

Today we have an account from the UK Telegraph that NASA fudged its numbers, at the direction of the man who has been one of global warming's chief proponents.

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand... So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The story was scarcely reported at all in the USA, owing perhaps the to the nearly religious orthodoxy that global warming has become, so much so that those who doubt it, even with evidence, are called "global warming deniers," a phrase that compares scientific skeptics to those who deny the occurrence of the Jewish Holocaust. What editor in the US press would dare report stories that question the Gospel According to St. Al?

Similar stories that call into question the assumptions of man-made climate change, such as NASA's report from 2006 that surface temps on Mars have been warming, go by the wayside with nary a comment.

This is the first time I've seen evidence of deliberate falsification of data, a crime in the world of science akin to that of plagiarism in the world of letters. If he falsified data to promote his own theory, Dr. Hansen should resign. And if he does not resign, he should be cashiered, regardless of his past accomplishments or reputation.

Science has no meaning as a means of discovering truth if its practitioners see fit to falsify data or rig experiments to prove their point. The objective is to design experiments to test and challenge theories.

I don't have an MS and I didn't learn this professionally; I learned it in the eighth grade from Mr. Owen, a fantastic public school science teacher who put it in our heads that science has one essential principle: Truth to Data.

Personally, I am skeptical about any scientific theory that is based mostly on computer models, rather than data. Computer models cannot reliably predict the price of cattle futures, let alone planetary climate. All scientific theories deserve challenges and tests; that's what science is all about. Fraudulent practice should called out, and frauds discredited.

Does Dr. Hansen's lie mean that global warming is a fraud, too? No. But it does put a light on the very unscientific ardor with which global warming has been advanced as a truth, one that does not require the usual scientific scrutiny because, dammit, we just don't have the time! We must enact broad taxes, regulations and give new power to governments to deal with the problem!

The broad claims made by the climate change alarmists, and their world-changing prescriptions, call for good evidence, and real debate about the merits of their arguments.

To make another allusion to my childhood, I remember reading the book, The Population Bomb, by Dr. Paul Ehrlich, then and now of Stanford University. It stated that a vast explosion of population outstripping the world's natural resources would plunge the entire planet into regional wars over food and fuel -- and that millions would starve to death in the 70s and 80s -- unless something was done. Something like strict new laws spreading birth control and regulating the number of children per family.

China, of course, adopted that law, and perhaps Dr. Ehrlich would tell us that this saved the planet from his dire predictions in 1968. But he is too busy promoting the new generational crisis, global warming. See a pattern here?

Like Ehrlich, the deep environmentalists and their kin would like to change this culture's value system and its dependence on economic growth as a means of advancement and progress. They advocate slow growth or no growth policies as a means to combat global warming, but one wonders if they have created global warming to promote no-growth economics, and re-cast the culture in a communitarian ideal.

Not content to live their own lives this way, the greens believe they must bring the rest of us along to save the planet. What better way to do it than behind the respected and apolitical banner of science? No one will dare to dispute the self-appointed experts, led by the Vice President from Harvard.

But all they have done is to politicize this corner of the scientific world, and Dr. Hansen has given us all good reason to doubt him and his movement's scientific credentials.