National Post ·
Last week, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) -- one of four agencies responsible for monitoring the global temperatures used by the UN'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.
Moreover, sea ice expanded so rapidly it covered 30% more of the 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 for when it's melting.)
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.
This October wasn't the warmest October ever, it was only the 70th-warmest in the past 114 years -- that is, 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
No one seemed to think a one-month jump of nearly a full degree warranted a double-check
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.
Some in the blogosphere 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 a 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. I believe this was simply a case of garbage in, garbage out. 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. Inexplicably, 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 UN'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 error. 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. This incident proves it is settled -- in their own minds. For too many, scientific inquiry has ceased.