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Lorne Gunter: Global 

Warming numbers get 

a little help from 

their friends

By Lorne Gunter

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NATIONALPOST.COM

November 17th, 2008

Last week, 

the Goddard Institute 

for Space Studies – 

one of four agencies responsible 

for monitoring the global 

temperatures used by the U.N.’s 

Intergovernmental Panel on 

Climate Change – 

released its statistics for October. 

According to the GISS figures, 

last month was the warmest 

October on record around 

the world.

This struck some 

observers as odd. 

There had been no reports of 

autumn heat waves in the 

international press and there 

is almost always blanket coverage 

of any unusually warm weather 

since it fits into the widespread 

media bias that climate 

catastrophe lies just ahead. 

In fact, 

quite the opposite had occurred; 

there had been plenty of stories 

about unseasonably cool weather.

London had experienced its first 

October snow in 70 years. 

Chicago and the Great Plains states had broken several lowest-temperature records, some of which had stood for 120 years. 

Tibet had broken snowfall records. 

Glaciers in Alaska, 

the Alps and New Zealand 

had begun advancing. 

Sea ice expanded so rapidly it covered 30% more of Arctic than at the end of October 2007. 

(Of course, you saw few 

stories about that, too, 

since interest in the Arctic ice 

cover is reserved only for when 

its melting reinforces hysteria 

over global warming and 

polar bear extinction).

So the GISS claim that October was the warmest ever seemed counterintuitive, to say the least.

Thanks, though, 

to Steve McIntyre, the Toronto computer analyst who maintains the blog climateaudit.org, and Anthony Watts, 

the American meteorologist who runs wattsupwiththat.com, 

we did not have to wait long to find out the cause of the GISS’s startling statistics: 

Data-entry error.

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October wasn’t the warmest October ever, 

it was only the 70^th warmest in the past 114 years – 

in the bottom half of all Octobers, 

not at the top of the list. 

So why the massive discrepancy 

between the published GISS 

numbers and the correct ones?

Um, some guy – 

not at Goddard, 

a GISS spokesman was quick to point out as he toed the ground and gazed downward sheepishly – 

had supplied the NASA branch with September figures for much of the globe, 

rather than October ones. 

September being typically a much warmer month than October 

(at least in the Northern Hemisphere), 

when the September temps had been entered into the October report they produced – 

heh, heh – 

an unprecedented spike upwards in last month’s temperature.

Yeah, no kidding, 

like when Santa’s bathroom scale 

readings are inadvertently entered 

into Paris Hilton’s weight diary 

and they produce an unprecedented 

upward tonnage.

I truly think there was simply 

a case of garbage in, 

garbage out.

There have been some in the blogosphere who have charged that GISS’s actions were deliberate; 

that the institute lied to cover up the fact that through most of 2008 global temperatures have been on a downward plunge. 

Since that’s bad news for an group that has been at the forefront of promoting climate-change hysteria, 

GISS manipulated the data to support its campaign.

Frankly, 

I don’t think it’s that nefarious. 

Still, I think a bigger problem – 

unscientific bias at GISS and elsewhere in the global-warming community – 

has been exposed by this incident.

September figures from scores of weather stations around the world seem merely to have been copied into the GISS October database. 

Temperatures from Ethiopia, Kenya, Tunisia, Kazakhstan, most of Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, Malaysia, the Philippines, Finland, the U.K., Ireland and elsewhere seem to have been incorrectly duplicated.

The problem isn’t that this mistake occurred, 

but rather that no one at Goddard seemed to think a one-month temperature jump of nearly a full degree worldwide warranted a double-check.

The keepers of one of the U.N.’s four primary temperature records are sure the globe is warming dangerously, 

so sure it never even occurred to them to check why or how October’s figures were so anomalous.

It took bloggers using little more than desktop PCs and Internet connections only a few hours to find the errors. 

The difference is, 

they were prepared to look. 

Their minds were not so clouded by bias in favour of the warming theory that they have stopped asking obvious questions.

Scientists and activists who support the warming theory often insist the science is settled and this incident proves it is settled – 

in their own minds. 

For too many, 

scientific inquiry has ceased.

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lgunter@shaw.ca (link)

National Post

 

Please Note: 

While this column states that this past October was the 70th warmest on record, 

it was only 70th warmest in the United States. 

Globally, October 2008 very

likely ranks among the top 10. 

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