Steve McIntyre has been interviewed on BBC Radio 4 about his discovery of errors in NASA’s temperature record. Scroll to 17m30s in. Points he makes:
- There are jumps in the data in 2000 because two different versions of data were used, one with adjustments and one without.
- These adjustments are often as large as the trend
- No-one is releasing details of how they calculate the adjustments. That doesn’t sound scientific to me: how are people supposed to verify the data?
- Now that NASA has corrected the error, the 1930s are just as hot as the 2000s.
- Many of the weather stations do not meet recognised standards. The weather station showing the largest upward temperature trend in the USA is in a car park in a city in Arizona.
Steve is very scientific and is careful not to make wild claims before he has all the information. But it is looking increasingly like the adjustments are not accounting correctly for the urban heat island effect. You can often predict which stations are urban and which are rural just by looking at the trends.
I’m going to make a prediction: most of the measured warming will be caused by confirmation bias in the way the adjustments are made. It’s probably just urbanisation that’s causing the upward trends in surface data. The actuality of climate science couldn’t be farther from the media consensus. The surface data is flawed. The satellite data doesn’t go back far enough and doesn’t match the models. The ice core data doesn’t prove that carbon dioxide causes temperature rise without ridiculously contorted reasoning. Climate models just model the modellers’ assumptions. What’s left?