More climate data manipulation

January 14, 2010

PRIMARY UNITED STATES CLIMATE CENTERS NOW CAUGHT IN DATA MANIPULATION

NEW REVELATIONS HEADLINED ON TV CLIMATE SPECIAL

Go to KUSI.com and see the program that was aired on KUSI TV.

It has been revealed that a "sleight of hand" was used in the computer program that rated 2005 as "THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.” Skeptical climate researchers have discovered extensive manipulation of the data within the U.S. Government's two primary climate centers: the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City. These centers are being accused of creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based. The two investigators say the system has been distorted in other ways as well. They have documented their findings in great detail in a scientific report that has been posted online. These findings are presented as a part of my television special report ”Global Warming: The Other Side” telecast Thursday night, January 14th at 9 PM here on KUSI TV.

The data manipulation studies are explored in detail during the fourth segment of the one hour video now available here on our website. Just click on the Global Warming special banner to go to the page.

NOAA and NASA start with the unadjusted NOAA GHCN (Global Historical Climate Network). NASA eliminates some stations and adds some in the polar regions. For NASA, the computer program that manipulates the data is known as GIStemp, Both then add their own adjustments to calculate a global average temperature and a ranking for each month and year. The two inter-related U.S Government agencies have so intertwined their programs and data sets that both are being challenged by the investigating team that has produced this "smoking gun of U.S. Climate-gate.” “We suspect each center will try to hide behind, ‘It’s them; Not us’ and point fingers at each other," says the Computer Programmer from San Jose behind these new revelations. He and a Certified Consulting Meteorologist from New Hampshire made their revelations public on January 14th on a prime time television special report at 9:00PM PST; on KUSI-TV, an independent television station in San Diego Perhaps that is why Dr. Richard Anthes, President of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in testimony to congress in March 2009 noted “The present federal agency paradigm with respect to NASA and NOAA is obsolete and nearly dysfunctional in spite of best efforts by both agencies.”

The U.S. Government’s National Weather Service uses the NCDC data in its record temperature news releases put out with much media fanfare on a regular basis as they declare a given month or year has set a record for warmth, supporting the global warming agenda.

Also, the NCDC/NASA GISS data are regularly used by climate researchers doing studies at various research centers and within university meteorology centers that are doing studies to support the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This data is also shared with other global centers such as the recently hacked or leaked East Anglia University Hadley Climate Center in England.

Programmer E. Michael Smith and CCM Joseph D’Aleo, the two men who did the research, also revealed there are no actual temperatures left in the computer database when it proclaimed "2005 WAS THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.” In the transition to a computer averaging system, the National Data Climate Center deleted actual temperatures at thousands of locations throughout the world as it evolved to a system of global grid boxes. The number that goes into each grid box is determined by averaging the temperatures of two or more weather observation stations nearest that grid box.

D'Aleo puts it this way, "Over 70 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by water and vast areas of land masses remain unpopulated as well. So it is reasonable to come up with some sort of grid method to simulate full global coverage. The problem arises because not all of the grid boxes have continuous temperature measurements from within them. So NCDC averages surrounding or nearby points and places that number in the box. In some cases those observations are from several hundreds of miles away. That produces a serious question, ‘Does the resulting number represent the average temperature for that region within meaningful limits?’” D'Aleo says it does not. "A vital issue,” he says is, "temperatures are not linear over space, but instead vary enormously because of differences in terrain, elevation, vegetation, water versus land and urbanization."

This problem is only the tip of the iceberg with the data being produced at NDCC. For one thing, it is clear that comparing data from previous years when the final figure was produced by averaging a large number of temperatures and those produced from a much smaller temperature set with large data gaps is comparing apples and oranges. “When the differences between the warmest year in history and the tenth warmest year is less than three quarters of a degree, it becomes silly to rely on such comparisons,” Smith and D’Aleo say. But that is exactly what has been done in touting the late 1990s and the early 2000s as the warmest ten years in history. "It is clearly a travesty and agenda- driven by global warming advocates,” D'Aleo asserts.

For E. Michael Smith this project was quite a test of his computer programming skills. "Opening, unraveling and understanding what is happening in a complex FORTRAN computer code, with 20 years of age and change in it, is a difficult and grueling task," he says, "and the deeper I dug the more amazing the details revealed. When doing a benchmark test of the program, I found patterns in the input data from NCDC that looked like dramatic and selective deletions of thermometers from cold locations." Smith says after awhile, it became clear this was not a random strange pattern he was finding, but a well designed and orchestrated manipulation process. "The more I looked, the more I found patterns of deletion that could not be accidental. Thermometers moved from cold mountains to warm beaches; from Siberian Arctic to more southerly locations and from pristine rural locations to jet airport tarmacs. The last remaining Arctic thermometer in Canada is in a place called 'The Garden Spot of the Arctic,’ always moving away from the cold and toward the heat. I could not believe it was so blatant and it clearly looked like it was in support of an agenda,” Smith says.

Here are the numbers behind the startling findings of the new research paper. The number of actual weather observation points used as a starting point for world average temperatures has been reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 in the most recent years. Still, more stations are dropped out in related programs and in the final NASA/GIStemp data file, it drops to about 1,000. That leaves much of the world unaccounted for,” says Joseph D'Aleo of ICECAP.us and SPPI.org, who has released a research study of the global temperature pattern today. "Think of it this way,” he continues, "if Minneapolis and other northern cities suddenly disappeared but Kansas City and St. Louis were still available, would you think an average of Kansas City and St. Louis would provide an accurate replacement for Minneapolis and expect to use that to determine how Minneapolis’ temperature has changed with any hope of accuracy?"

E. Michael Smith pointed out that the November 2009 "anomaly map" from GISS shows a very hot Bolivia, which is covered by high mountains. "One small problem: there have been no temperatures recorded in the NCDC data set for Bolivia since 1990. NASA/GISS have to fill in or make up the numbers from up to 1200km away. This is on the beach in Peru or in the Amazon jungle," he said.
He and D'Aleo say it is startling where the temperatures are that have been dropped from the calculation. "A very high percentage of those dropped are from the more northern locations. Very few are left north of sixty degrees longitude.” “Clearly there is also a bias to leave in locations with warmer temperatures, i.e. from the arid areas and within the urban warmth of cities,” he adds. In the greatest reduced list of locations, there are very few colder mountain locations retained.

E. Michael Smith and Joe D'Aleo are both interviewed as part of a report on this study on the television special, "Global Warming: The Other Side" seen at 9 PM on January 14th on KUSI-TV, channel 9/51, San Diego, California. That program will be available on-demand at KUSI.com at the conclusion of the broadcast. The detailed report by D’Aleo is available at http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NOAAroleinclimategate.pdf

For more information, contact:

E. Michael Smith at pub4all@aol.com
Smith's climate blog: http://chiefio.wordpress.com/gistemp

Joseph D’Aleo at Jsdaleo6331@aol.com, or 603-689-5646

D’Aleo website: http://www.icecap.us