When NASA recently announced that it was revising its temperature data, right-wing bloggers leaped at the news to propel its global warming denial campaign.
James Hansen — head of the NASA center — sets the record straight. He writes that the “corrected and uncorrected curves are indistinguishable,” adding that the “deceit” propagated by the right “has a clear purpose: to confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change.”
Quote:
The nation’s top climate scientist is so frustrated over the nonsense racing about the blogsophere and mainstream media about the tiny flaw in NASA’s U.S. temperature database that he has already sent out two e-mails on the subject. In the first, James Hansen wrote:"The flaw did have a noticeable effect on mean U.S. temperature anomalies, as much as 0.15°C, as shown in Figure 1 below (for years 2001 and later, and 5 year mean for 1999 and later)".
Not bloody much of an effect. He goes onto say"The effect on global temperature (Figure 2) was of order one-thousandth of a degree, so the corrected and uncorrected curves are indistinguishable."
Yes, the globe is still warming at an alarming rate — and we still aren’t doing anything about it — which is why in his second, more impassioned email, he writes:"The deceit behind the attempts to discredit evidence of climate change reveals matters of importance. This deceit has a clear purpose: to confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change, thus delaying effective action to mitigate climate change. The danger is that delay will cause tipping points to be passed, such that large climate impacts become inevitable" http://climateprogress.org/2007/08/1...perature-data/
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