The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXIII

The scandal that I call “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time” is the alteration of official world temperature data by a small number of government employees in the US and the UK. Uniformly, the alterations have the effect of lowering temperatures early in the record, and raising recent temperatures, in order to create and enhance a warming trend that does not exist in the data as originally reported. The purpose of the fraudulent data alteration is to support the continuation of the “global warming” climate scare. To read the prior 22 posts in this series, go to this link.

Despite what you might think from reading the mainstream press, the past few years in world temperatures have not been particularly good for the continuation of climate alarm. No matter how you measure them (the main methods being ground thermometers, weather balloons, and satellites), world atmospheric temperatures have gone down for more than three years since a peak reached in early 2016. The data set that I consider to be the most reliable — the satellite-based measurements from the University of Alabama at Huntsville — gives the global temperature “anomaly” for the most recent month (June 2019) as +0.47 deg C. That is well down from the peak of +0.88 deg C in early 2016, and represents a decrease of about a third of what had been the entire increase since the satellite record began in 1979. Here is the most recent UAH global lower atmosphere temperature graph:

The failure of temperatures to continue to rise in accordance with alarmist model predictions has left the alarm-promoting guys at NASA and NOAA without fodder for their former annual “hottest year ever!!!” press releases. From the NASA end-of-year-2018 release:

2018 Was the Fourth Warmest Year, Continuing Long Warming Trend. . . . The 2018 global temperature average ranks behind 2016, 2017, and 2015.

I leave it for you to figure out how a year that was down from 2017, which in turn was down from 2016, somehow “continues[es] [a] long warming trend.” In a real “long warming trend,” shouldn’t each year be successively warmer than the previous year?

So what is to be done? Readers of this series will not be surprised to learn that in this period where not so many people are looking, the temperature adjusters have been beavering away in the bowels of their collections of data, continuing to send inconvenient readings of the past down the memory hole, and to “adjust” the temperatures of the past down, and of the present up. Let me provide a small roundup of some things that have been discovered recently.

At NoTricksZone on June 25, Pierre Gosselin posts some work by a Japanese guy named Kirye. Kirye is a Japanese climate skeptic Twitter-blogger, but his Twitter page is in Japanese, so you probably won’t be able to read it. Kirye noticed that NASA came out on June 14 with a new version, version 4, of its surface-thermometer-based temperature series known as GISTEMP. GISTEMP v.4 is now based on the records of the also-newly-adjusted Global Historical Climate Network group of temperature stations, now called GHCN v.4. Kirye then analyzes the new data from NASA at six particular and widely-scattered weather stations: Punta Arenas, Chile; Marquette, Michigan; Port Elizabeth, South Africa; Davis, Antarctica; Hachijojima, Japan; and Valencia, Ireland.

Sure enough, there have been additional adjustments, as always in the same direction — older down, and newer up. But those adjustments between v.3 and v.4 have been relatively minor. More significantly, Kirye discovered a different maneuver which is even more incredible, and which he proves by direct links back to NASA’s own website: In the v.4 graphs that it provides, NASA has relabeled the hugely-adjusted v.3 data as “unadjusted.”

I’ll go in detail through just one of the sites for purposes of illustration. I pick Marquette, Michigan. The NASA graph for v.3 for that site can be found at this link. That graph shows both “unadjusted” and “adjusted” temperatures. The “unadjusted” graph shows a temperature peak in the 1930s followed by a substantial cooling trend since. The v.3 adjusted temperatures closely match the unadjusted in the recent years; but in the early years (1880 even to the 1970s) there are dramatic downward adjustments, averaging over 2 full deg C, thus creating a strong artificial warming trend. Then go to the brand-new NASA v.4 graph for the same site. The series that was labeled as “adjusted” on the v.3 graph has now been relabeled “unadjusted,” as a prelude to some further adjustments (which are less dramatic than the previous ones but still up to 1 deg C).

Kirye provides an animated comparison of the NASA v.3 and v.4 “unadjusted” temperature series. A small cooling trend in the v.3 unadjusted series has been turned into a strong warming trend in what is called v.4 “unadjusted” series (but is actually the v.3 adjusted series).

You can go to the links for the NASA graphs and verify that Kirye has accurately copied what they have done. Amazing. The exact same thing occurs at each of the five other sites, although the magnitude of the change in trend is not as great at the other sites. However, although the magnitude of the change in trend may vary, the direction of the change in trend created by the now-memory-holed “adjustments” is always the same — the warming trend is enhanced.

Another data point for today comes from the UK and from an independent blogger named Clive Best. Best reminds us that back in the period 1998 to 2013, there was something called the “hiatus,” where world temperatures failed to rise for a full 15 years despite ongoing calls for climate alarm. One of the data sources supporting the existence of the “hiatus” at the time was a UK-based surface temperature series called HadCRUT, coming from the Hadley Center at the University of East Anglia. In a post on June 24 titled “What Ever Happened To The Global Warming Hiatus?”, Best traces “adjustments” to the HadCRUT data series that have occurred in recent years. Turns out that in a series of seemingly very small adjustments, the “hiatus” has been completely erased. In the most recent data release, the years 2005, 2010 and 2014 have all suddenly turned out to have been warmer than 1998, although recorded at the time as cooler. Here is Best’s graph:

Funny that once again, each one of the adjustments somehow enhances the warming trend. Is it really possible that never once does any new data, or adjustment to data, lead to a change in the other direction?

And finally, over at the site Climate Scepticism on June 30, Paul Matthews notices that the Hadley guys have also recently come out with a new version of their sea surface temperature series, HadSST4. And how does this v.4 compare to the superseded v.3? I’ll bet you can’t guess:

Matthews points out the the larger tick marks on the graph are for 1850, 1900, 1950 and 2000. Anyway, just this most recent adjustment has added about 0.1 deg C to the claimed temperature increase. It may not seem like much, but remember, they “adjust” these things regularly, and every adjustment results in a little bit more of the ongoing artificial enhancement of the supposed warming.