SPANISH
NEWS: As the general election approaches, this gets less and less
interesting, as attention increasingly concentrates on promises that
everyone with half a brain knows will never be believed. In his book, Fango, Baltasar
Garzón cites the first socialist president, Felipe González,
telling him that election commitments here are never intended to be
implemented. I could find the exact quote if the 604 page book had an
index. But, in accordance with what I'm told are Spanish norms, it
doesn't.
GLOBAL
WARMING: Is it really "One of the greatest scientific scandals
of all time"? See this article at the end of this post. By the
notorious heretic, Christopher Booker.
THE
MIDDLE EAST: Rather than taking out terrorist leaders, wouldn't it be
easier and better to take out all the world's arms dealers? And all
those who step into their shoes? Why don't we have a global
referendum on this, to give the assassination squads legal backing at
the UN? An organisation which might just be able to
organise (albeit hyper-expensively) a piss-up in a brewery.
THE EU:
Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian and El País cheerleader for the EU.
Here he is, in the former, sounding rather more ambivalent than
usual. It seems to me.
THE US
ELECTIONS: A nice quote: There are at least 14 people who would
make much, much worse presidents than George W Bush, and, alarmingly,
all of them are currently running for president.
FINALLY .
. . YESTERDAY'S JOKE FROM RT (RUSSIAN TV): "As demonstrated
over the Turkey affair, Putin is a moderate force".
The
fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever
When future generations
look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing
will shock them more than the extent to which the official
temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested –
were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed
much more than the actual data justified.
Two weeks ago, under
the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global
warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his
Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature
graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the
temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the
actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so
that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.
This was only the
latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert
observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger
question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.
Following my last
article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather
stations around the original three. In each case he found the same
suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US
government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were
then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the
Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate
Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate
temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no
measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which
scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global
warming”.
Homewood has now turned
his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic,
between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees
E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have
been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was
indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised
no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate
research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been
in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely
“disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a
period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy.
One of the first
examples of these “adjustments” was exposed in 2007 by the
statistician Steve McIntyre, when he discovered a paper published in
1987 by James Hansen, the scientist (later turned fanatical climate
activist) who for many years ran Giss. Hansen’s original graph
showed temperatures in the Arctic as having been much higher around
1940 than at any time since. But as Homewood reveals in his blog
post, “Temperature adjustments transform Arctic history”, Giss
has turned this upside down. Arctic temperatures from that time have
been lowered so much that that they are now dwarfed by those of the
past 20 years.
Homewood’s interest
in the Arctic is partly because the “vanishing” of its polar ice
(and the polar bears) has become such a poster-child for those trying
to persuade us that we are threatened by runaway warming. But he
chose that particular stretch of the Arctic because it is where ice
is affected by warmer water brought in by cyclical shifts in a major
Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years ago
when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The
ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.
Of much more serious
significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the
official temperature record – for reasons GHCN and Giss have never
plausibly explained – has become the real elephant in the room of
the greatest and most costly scare the world has known.
This really
does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of
all time.
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