New paper claims no pause in warming, but unaltered data says otherwise

By Thomas Richard, Examiner.com

Environmental activists have plundered Nature’s Scientific Reports and released a paper yesterday that they claim removes all doubt there is a global warming pause. After examining 40 peer-reviewed papers that show a global warming hiatus, they claim the papers didn’t examine a long enough period of time.

In fact, the authors—Stephan Lewandowsky, James Risbey, and Naomi Oreskes—broke the golden rule of science: they started with a predetermined outcome and then cherry-picked the data to fit their conclusion. It also runs counter to the unaltered datasets from leading climate institutions.

The paper assessed the “magnitude and significance of all possible trends up to 25 years duration looking backwards from each year over the past 30 years.” Unsurprisingly, the authors thought the papers didn’t use a long enough time frame to show a clear global warming pause over the entire global warming “record.” Here we document how this extended global warming record has been tampered, altered, and utilized for politicized “green ideology,” and how massive alterations were made to both NASA and NOAA’s temperature data series.

According to the satellite record (the most accurate), weather balloons, radiosonde data, sea surface temperatures, and weather stations (least accurate), previously unadulterated data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA GISS) data showed a long-term definitive trend: no increase in tropospheric temperatures when the Industrial Revolution began in earnest after World War II.

We do have weather station temperature data, albeit spotty, that goes back to 1881 and it shows regular intervals of warming and cooling, and not the popular upward slope in temperatures used by environmentalists and governments to illustrate dramatic global warming. More on that shortly.

All of this is important because global warming theory predicts the upper troposphere will warm from trapped heat, just like in a greenhouse. The surface of the Earth warms later to reach equilibrium. Except since 1979, we’ve had orbiting satellites measuring the atmosphere from five miles from the surface and it shows the upper atmosphere is warming far less than expected. They are accurate to .001 degrees Celsius. It doesn’t get more accurate than that.

This new paper, however, went online right before the upcoming Paris Climate Talks in December, even though it was submitted back in early May. A quick perusal of other articles at Scientific Reports shows lead times of only a few months, so the timing of its late November release is highly dubious. It also comes on the heels of recent reports by NOAA and NASA GISS that also eliminate the global warming hiatus after they dramatically altered their own temperature datasets.

NOAA, using dodgy methods that left many mainstream climate scientists bewildered,modified its sea surface temperature record (using the ERSST v4), making the last twenty years appear warmer. NASA then announced it would begin using NOAA’s cooked data to supplant its own temperature record in order to claim there was no global warming hiatus (or pause) either.

Now, according to the prominent German-based publication ‘Die Achse des Guten’, veteran journalist Günter Ederer writes an investigative piece showcasing how ‘massive alterations’ were made to the NASA GISS temperature data series. Based on the work of retired geologist and data computation expert Professor Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert, Ederer illustrates how the figures supporting NASA’s global warming claims have been “massively altered” on multiple occasions. The German article, which was translated by P. Gosselin and reported at No Tricks Zone, highlights Ewert’s discovery.

First Professor Ewert meticulously “examined and tabulated the reams of archived data from 1,153 stations that go back to 1881,” the same data that led the UN’s IPCC to say with 97 percent confidence that man is heating the Earth’s atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels. According to Ederer, what the professor found was “unbelievable:”

From the publicly available data, Dr. Ewert learned that:

“Between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered so that they showed a significant warming, especially after 1950. […] A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own datasets so that especially after WWII a clear warming appears – although it never existed.”

Dr. Ewert found alterations from station data located all over the world, including the Arctic, that produced a definitive warming effect. The previous, unaltered data showed that the planet went through “regular warming and cooling cycles” even as carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere went from .03 percent to .04 percent (observed CO2 measurements began in 1959). After the revisions, a warming trend appeared. Dr. Ewert, who is an expert in statistical calculations, said that NASA used 10 different methods to alter its data.

Ederer writes that the top six methods employed to alter its data were:

• Reducing the annual mean in the early phase.
• Reducing the high values in the first warming phase.
• Increasing individual values during the second warming phase.
• Suppression of the second cooling phase starting in 1995.
• Shortening the early decades of the datasets.
• With the long-term datasets, even the first century was shortened.

Analyzing the same datasets, Dr. Ewert found that NASA had altered the data on at least three occasions. By looking at the data that had no tampering, the trend shows a net cooling effect since 1881. Ederer writes that media reports claiming there is ongoing global warming are not based on the actual data but on data that has been repeatedly altered by NASA, now headed by Charles Bolden and who was appointed by President Obama in 2009.

Ederer writes that, “Thus the issue of man-made global warming has taken on a whole new meaning: Yes, it is always man-made if the data are adjusted to fit the theory. The meticulous work by Ewert has predecessors, and fits a series of scandals and contradictions that are simply being ignored by the political supporters of man-made climate change.”

Like the authors of the ostensible hiatus-buster paper penned by authors who have stakes in the ever-growing global warming industry. One author, Naomi Oreskes, even penned a book, ‘Merchants of Doubt’, of the titular box-office flop, who likened dissenting scientists and organizations dubious of man-made global warming to the tactics utilized by Big Tobacco.

As noted, NASA announced in July it would be supplanting its own temperature records with those from NOAA, which also altered the temperature record, specifically sea surface temperatures. NOAA’s alterations also had the same effect of making the global warming hiatus disappear (more here). Keep in mind that up until the data tampering began in 2010, NOAA, NASA, and the UK’s Climatic Research Unit/UK all reported a global warming hiatus.

And all this tampering has gotten the attention of the House oversight committee on Science and Technology, which is investigating NOAA after whistleblowers came forward to report political machinations and improper data manipulation.

As early as 2008, a report by NOAA reads that, “Observations indicate that global temperature rise has slowed in the last decade. … This is despite a steady increase in radiative forcing as a result of human activities and has led some to question climate predictions of substantial twenty-first century warming.” It also says this slowdown is “much less than the 0.18°C recorded between 1979 and 2005 and the .2°C/decade expected in the next decade” by the IPCC.

Something to keep in mind ahead of the upcoming UN-sponsored Paris climate talks (COP 21), where climate expert Dr. Judith Curry noted that its “foundation at this point is green ideology and not science.” The climate talks, which will host 147 heads of states all gathered in one place, will take place in late November and into early December. President Obama will be attending the summit.