Is the planet actually cooling now?

March 4, 2008

 

We’re seeing it all over the place.  Record and near record cold temperatures.  Record and near record snowfall.  In Gilford, NH, much of the winter carnival there had to be canceled because of too much winter.  China has seen its coldest winter in 100 years.  Baghdad saw snow for the first time in recorded history.  North America has seen the most snowfall in 50 years.  Where are all the global warming alarmists?

 

They tend to hibernate during such times of contrary evidence.  They’ll pick an unseasonably warm patch of weather here or a tornado there and try to make their case but the evidence, like the snow, is piling up against them.

 

According to four major institutes that track temperature, we’ve actually been cooling for the past twelve months.  The Hadley Climate Research Temperature Unit in the UK, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies all track a downward trend over the last year.  They average a drop of 0.6405 degrees Celsius.  That may not sound like much but keep in mind, the big brouhaha over global warming has coalesced around a “consensus” that the earth has warmed by a whopping half degree Celsius over the past 100 years.

 

Not only have we been cooling over the last year but three of the four show a cooling trend dating back to 1998.  The only one that doesn’t is the Goddard Institute.  Ironically, its director is none other than James Hansen, father of the modern global warming movement.  Hansen is the one who claimed the Bush administration was muzzling him despite the fact that he has conducted over 1,400 interviews.

 

Anthony Watts is a self-proclaimed “greenie” who has solar panels in his home and compact fluorescent bulbs in his light fixtures.  He’s a big proponent of alternative energy.  However, he’s also a meteorologist who finds it difficult to ignore the facts.  He hosts a scientific website where issues of temperature and climate are freely discussed.  Watts compared the data from all four temperature data sources over a 30 year period and discovered something quite interesting.  Hadley and Goddard gather their data in a similar fashion.  Both employ land temperature stations.  The others employ satellite data instead.  Although they use similar data, Goddard’s data show a different picture than Hadley’s.  Goddard’s skews far warmer than the rest.

 

The answer to why the Goddard data is warmer can be explained by their methodology.  Since much of the Goddard data come from terrestrial testing stations there’s no accounting for what is referred to as the urban heat island effect.  In other words, asphalt and concrete tend to retain heat therefore cities are warmer than the suburbs.  If a city has grown up around your testing site then you will, quite naturally, begin to record warmer temperatures.

 

Watts is also critical of Goddard’s “non-compliant weather stations.”  He compiled a list of temperature stations employed by Goddard across the country.  Watts had already determined that 55 percent of them had reading errors of at least 5 degrees Celsius.  Interestingly, Goddard and Hadley use many of the same testing stations.  Watts offered the possibility that “differences in preparation lead to significant differences in the final data-set.”  He didn’t want to say it but I will.  We’re talking “data manipulation.”  It’s rather embarrassing if you’re considered the father of global warming and your data show a pattern of cooling rather than warming.  Talk about your inconvenient truth.

 

With the exception of Fox News, the mainstream media have ignored this story.  That’s called “media manipulation.”