The Great Temperature Adjustment Flap

Patrick J. Michaels Matt Drudge has been riveting eyeballs by highlighting a London Telegraph piece calling the “fiddling” of raw temperature histories “the biggest science scandal ever.” The fact of the matter is some of the adjustments that have been tacked onto some temperature records are pretty alarming—but what do they really mean? One of the more egregious ones has been the adjustment of the long-running record from Central Park (NYC). Basically it’s been flat for over a hundred years but the National Climatic Data Center, which generates its own global temperature history, has stuck a warming trend of several degrees in it during the last quarter-century, simply because it doesn’t agree with some other stations (which also don’t happen to be in the stable urban core of Manhattan). Internationally, Cato Scholar Ross McKitrick and yours truly documented a propensity for many African and South American stations to report warming that really isn’t happening.  Some of those records, notably in Paraguay and central South America, have been massively altered. At any rate, Chris Booker, author of the Telegraph article, isn’t the first person to be alarmed at what has been done to some of the temperature records.  Others, such as Richard Muller, from UC-Berkeley, along with Steven Mosher, were so concerned that they literally re-invented the surface temperature history from scratch. In doing so, both of them found the “adjustments” really don...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs