Global warming?

[xoxoxoBruce]

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

Well it wasn't really, as a matter of fact.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

But they have an explanation.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

And it's not the first time chicken little has been wrong.

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

There's more

[TheMercenary]

statistics, lies, and statistics.

[Bullitt]

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

[classicman]

Global cooling will be all the rage next year.

[TheMercenary]

I see a shift in global climates.

[Beestie]

Seems to me the underlying premise of the Global Warming hypothesis is that the world's climate is tending towards an equilibrium state and that we are interfering with it by adding to its instability.

While we are, in fact, screwing with the climate by significantly altering the composition of the atmosphere, the idea that we are steering it completely off-course borders on delusional.

There is nothing happening that hasn't happened tens of times before.

The safe money isn't on preventing it, its on dealing with it.

[TheMercenary]

I say the Poles are shifting. The Lithuanians are moving South.

[Clodfobble]

I had a dream last night that the magnetic poles finally reversed (we're way overdue) and all our electronics broke. I have kind of nerdy dreams.

[TheMercenary]

All our toilets would be so seriously fk'd up, they could never swirl in the other direction.

[smoothmoniker]

Pretty sure it's not magnetic field that influences the spin of the water, I think it has something to do with the angle off-axis of your location against the equator.

[JuancoRocks]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

statistics, lies, and statistics.

'Forty-two percent of all statistics are made up" - Stephen Wright

[ZenGum]

Yes, but four out of five people make up 80% of the population.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by smoothmoniker

Pretty sure it's not magnetic field that influences the spin of the water, I think it has something to do with the angle off-axis of your location against the equator.

Yeah, that and where the little nozzle thingies are aimed under the toilet bowl rim.

[barefoot serpent]

Originally Posted by glatt

the little nozzle thingies

speak for yourself

[glatt]

Oh, burn.