2014-- Hottest Year Ever Recorded? Look!

Figure 1

     You can see immediately that 2014 is not the hottest year among even the last 18 years. Not by a long shot. Why is this chart be so different from the widely reported announcement in January by NOAA and NASA that 2014 was the hottest ever (“ever” being just since 1880, when records began)? The difference results from different temperature data being used. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) base their analyses on surface temperature measurements. The graph shown above is based on satellite measurements, which are far more accurate and don't show any warming. Satellite measurements show 2014 was only the sixth warmest year of the last 18.

     Since 72 percent of the earth's surface is covered by oceans, temperature measurements are unavailable for a large part of the earth's surface. By contrast, satellite measurements cover the entire earth not just at the surface but at various elevations all the way to the top of the atmosphere. There are over 160 meteorological satellites orbiting the earth and transmitting 80 million measurements every day to an accuracy of one one-hundredth of a degree. Land based thermometers can do no better than one-tenth of a degree. Clearly the satellite data is far more comprehensive and accurate than that of the surface stations. In fact, the satellite measurement systems were developed because of the weaknesses and inaccuracies of the land-based network. Yet neither NASA nor NOAA use the satellite data.

     Those two agencies reported the amount of warming that made 2014 the hottest year was two-hundredths of a degree. No mention was made of the accuracy of the measurement or the range of probable error. It is against normal scientific practice to have a margin of error greater than the precision of the measurement. Yet a two-hundredths degree of warming was reported based on temperature measurements with an accuracy of one-tenth of a degree—that is, the error bar was five times larger than the reported result. An error of a tenth of a degree is in the statistical 95% uncertainty range.

     Even greater uncertainty has been exposed by examination of the data itself. It has been subjected to bias, both deliberate and unintentional, in several ways which do not occur with satellite data.

     In 2007 it was revealed that GISS had been artificially inflating U.S. temperatures by 0.15 degrees Celsius since the year 2000. NASA had claimed that six of the ten hottest years in U.S. history had occurred since 1995. When the erroneous data was corrected, 1998 (an unusually warm year due to El Nino—not carbon dioxide) was no longer the warmest year of the past century in the US. It fell to second place, with 1934 now being the warmest. And third place now belonged to 1921, not 2006. The formerly high-ranking years 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2004 fell well down the leader board—behind even 1900. Four of the top ten were now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938, 1939. Since more than 80 percent of the century's increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide occurred after 1940, the warmer temperatures of earlier years can't be explained by higher carbon dioxide levels.  So why should we believe all the hype about increased CO2 emissions causing catastrophic warming in the future? Remember, too, that while CO2 was increasing steadily since 1940, the earth's temperature was decreasing from 1940 until 1975—leading to widespread media reports about fears of a new ice age.

     In April 2008 Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre documented that NASA has been “rewriting history time and time again.”  Still, NASA continued the process. It falsely reported that October 2008 was the warmest October on record. Statistical scientists jumped on this claim, leading even NASA to admit it was wrong.

     Then meteorologist Anthony Watts caught GISS and James Hansen doctoring data records from Santa Rosa, California, and potentially other temperature stations. The charts below show how Hansen and his underlings turned a long-term decline into a long-term temperature increase.

Raw Data:

                                                                           Figure 2

GISS “Adjustment”:

                                                                           Figure 3

Figure 2 shows actual readings reported by the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN). GISS arrives at its numbers, illustrated on Figure 3, by taking the USHCN data and applying secret adjustments. USHCN reports a temperature decline of nearly one-half degree Celsius during the twentieth century, while GISS reports an increase of one-half a degree. Hansen has refused to explain how and why he makes these adjustments. His s secrecy raises an ethical and perhaps legal question of whether the head of an agency federally funded by U.S. taxpayers can refuse to disclose how those funds are spent. It also raises the question of whether the adjustments are legitimate or merely deliberate manipulations contrived to produce a desired result.

     James Hansen is the NASA scientist who started the whole global warming hysteria in 1988 when he told a Senate committee he was 99 percent sure global warming was already underway. The news  media seized upon Hansen's unsupported testimony and parlayed it into an impending planetary crisis. A new industry was born. Billions of dollars were spent, and tens of thousands of jobs were created, giving rise to growing numbers of people with vested interests in promoting the specter of global warming. James Hansen gave them ammunition. For years, as head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), he has “repeatedly been caught providing erroneous temperature reports that always err on the side of claiming more warming than has occurred,” wrote James Taylor in the February 2009  issue of Environment & Climate News. Perhaps this explains why Hansen has been adamantly opposed to having NASA utilize satellite temperature data.

     There are five official temperature data records. Three of these are surface records. The other two are satellite records furnished by Remote Sensing Service (RSS) and the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAL).

     The three surface records are NASA's (GISS), NOAA, and the University of East Anglia/Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office. All three are run by passionate believers in man-made global warming, and all three depend on data supplied by ground stations via the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), managed by the US National Climate Data Center under NOAA. A shocking report by two veteran meteorologists Anthony Watts and Joseph D'Aleo states, “All the data centers, most notably NOAA and NASA, conspired in the manipulation of global temperature records.” Thus all three do not display independent research confirming the work of the others; instead they demonstrate their common corruption.

     Here's another example of tampering with climate data, this one reported very recently, January 2015. It covers massive falsification of records for 65 years of data covering a vast area stretching across Brazil and Paraguay. Paul Homewood noticed that this area, according to GISS records, showed a temperature rise between 1950 and 2014 of more than twice the accepted global increase for the entire century. He was able to compare the original data with what was reported by GISS. Far from the temperature increase shown by GISS, the original data showed the temperatures declined by a full degree over those 65 years. The graphs below demonstrate this difference for the Puerto Casada station.

The adjusted graph from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies:

                                                                     Figure 4

Below, the raw data in graph form:

                                                                      Figure 5

Only two other rural stations exist in this vast area, and Homewood found the same thing happened with data there. You can see these graphs here.

     There is a far larger and more serious distortion in the global temperature data than falsifying the reports from the individual measuring stations. Temperature records throughout the world have been falsified by manipulating the locations of the reporting stations. Beginning about 1990, higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations were removed from the network in order to create a false warming trend. The global temperature record that used to be based on 6,000 reporting stations now is based on fewer than 1,500. The thoroughly-researched 106-page report by Joseph D'Aleo and Anthony Watts documents the effect with this graph: 

Figure 6

The rise in global temperature correlates with eliminating 
data from weather stations likely to show cooling, 

     In many cases the stations are still reporting, but their data are no longer utilized. Often the stations have been replaced by others more likely to show warming from lower elevations, lower latitudes, or urban development, which reflects the well-known “heat island” effect of cities. Data gaps are filled in by extrapolating from nearby stations.  Here are some examples from the D'Aleo/Watts report:

     "In the cold countries of Russia and Canada, the rural stations in the Polar Regions were thinned out leaving behind the lower latitude more urban stations. The data from the remaining cities were used to estimate the temperatures to the north. As a result the computed new averages were higher than the averages when the cold stations were part of the monthly/yearly assessment.

     "In Canada, the number of stations dropped from 600 to less than 50. The percentage of stations in the lower elevations (below 300 feet) tripled and those at the higher elevations above 3,000 feet were reduced by half. [The] depicted warmth comes from interpolating from more southerly locations to fill northerly vacant grid boxes, even as a simple average of the available stations shows an apparent cooling."

     Environment Canada reports that there are 1400 weather stations in Canada, many reporting even hourly readings that are readily available on the internet but not included in the global data base. Canada has 100 stations north of the Arctic Circle, but NOAA uses just one.

     The Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) claims the Hadley Center has tampered with the Russian data: "The IEA believes the Russian meteorological station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country's territory and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25 percent of such stations in its reports. The Russian station count dropped from 476 to 121 so over 40 percent of Russian territory was not included in global temperature calculations for some other reasons than the lack of meteorological stations and observations."

     The Russians found that the 121 sites used gave mostly warmer reports than the 355 unused sites. In some cases stations records going back into the 19th Century were ignored in favor of stations with less data but which pointed to warming. The IEA team stated, “Only one tenth of meteorological sites with complete temperature series are used.”

     In Europe higher mountain stations were dropped and thermometers were marched toward the Mediterranean, lower elevations, and more cities. The station dropout was almost 65 percent for Europe as a whole and 50 percent for the Nordic countries.

     Africa is not showing warming despite efforts to make it appear so by eliminating thermometers from cool areas like the Moroccan coast and moving them toward the Sahara.

     Analyst E. Michael Smith found that most of the stations remaining in the United States are at airports. Most mountain stations of the west are gone. In California the only remaining stations are in San Francisco, Santa Maria, Los Angeles and San Diego.

     As recently as 1988, temperature records for China came from over 400 stations. In 1990, only 35.

     The raw temperature data show no trend in temperatures in Northern Australia in 125 years. The IPCC, however, uses “adjusted” data. NOAA makes data “adjustments” to remove “inhomogeneities” and for other reasons. The D'Aleo/Watts report says, “We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? NOAA added a huge, artificial, imaginary trend to the most recent half of the raw data.” The raw temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 C. per century. After the NOAA adjustment, the temperatures were rising 1.2 C per century. 

     NASA applies an “urbanization adjustment,” but Steve McIntyre reveals that NASA made the adjustment in the wrong direction, exaggerating the warming effect instead of showing what the temperatures would be without urban development. NASA is always tampering with its data. John Goetz has shown it “adjusted” 20 percent of its data sixteen times in two and a half years. 

     Lastly, we take note of the absurdity of recent studies and observations purporting to show that the effects of global warming are already occurring. In a cause-and-effect relationship, the effect cannot occur before the cause. You can't have effects from global warming when there is no global warming and has been none for over 18 years—despite a massive increase in carbon dioxide emissions.  Clearly carbon dioxide emissions have not caused global warming, because the actual temperature records show no warming. Those records have been falsified to justify the global warming doctrine for political purposes.