A new study by two scientists and a veteran statistician examines the veracity of Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) data produced by NOAA, Hadley, and NASA. They conclude that the severe adjustments to the raw data “are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”
In fact, most of the observed global warming is due to these adjustments. “Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record-setting warming,” they conclude.
According to Watts Up With That:
“Nearly all of the warming they are now showing is in the adjustments,” Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, a study co-author, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview. “Each dataset pushed down the 1940s warming and pushed up the current warming.”
“You would think that when you make adjustments, you’d sometimes get warming and sometimes get cooling. That’s almost never happened,” said D’Aleo, who co-authored the study with statistician James Wallace and Cato Institute climate scientist Craig Idso.
Their study found measurements “nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history,” which was “nearly always accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern.”
“The conclusive findings of this research are that the three [global average surface temperature] data sets are not a valid representation of reality,” the study found. “In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, is totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”
Based on these results, the study’s authors claim the science underpinning the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to regulate greenhouse gases “is invalidated.”
The graph below from the study particularly highlights the extreme nature of the data manipulation. It summarizes the total adjustments made to the GISS global data over the last 130 years (click to enlarge):
As can be seen from the graph, the data has been artificially cooled in the past, and warmed in recent decades, resulting in a net increased warming. For this to be correct, the surface temperature measurements must have a long-term false cooling trend that needs to be corrected. However, most of the known sources of error contribute to false warming, most notably the urban heat island effect. New buildings, more roads, deforestation, more energy usage, population growth and urban sprawl all contribute to warming that only occurs locally, and therefore needs to be corrected downwards in the temperature measurements. Very few known factors give rise to artificial cooling. Therefore, the manipulation of the data is highly suspect.
In fact, a peer-reviewed statistical study by the two scientists Ross McKitrick and Pat Michaels shows that nearly half of the global warming since 1980 can be explained by local warming due to population growth and economic growth. Their finding suggests that the data should have been adjusted in the opposite direction.
The adjustments of the data are causing a major controversy in the scientific community. The climate skeptics are claiming that to save their defunct models, the scientists who are heavily vested in the climate change scare have to cheat and artificially create warming in the data where none exists.
The jury is still out on the subject, but ordinary people have the right to know that without artificial adjustments there would be minimal global warming and draw their own conclusions from that.
