A Record Warm October Leaves NASA In The Cold

Until late last year global warming proponents pointed out that temperature records showed that 1998 was the hottest year ever recorded in the United States.

In fact, Several of the years surrounding 1998 were also very warm and near the record as well. It certainly appeared that the climate was progressively warming when reviewing the historical record.

That was before a Canadian blogger named Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit set the NASA temperature record straight. Mcintyre audited the actual records and found substantial errors. When he reported his findings to NASA scientists, they conducted a review that showed he was indeed correct.

This led NASA to revise the data published on its website. The errors changed the historical facts concerning the global warming argument. The hottest year in the United States was no longer 1998, but 1934. 2001 was no longer even listed in the Top Ten. Instead, four of the top ten hottest years were back the 1930s.

One year later, the problem of inaccurate data providing dubious global warming conclusions has embarrassed NASA once again. Last Monday, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This NASA claim was hard to understand since in the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had already ranked October temperatures as the 70th-warmest October in the last 114 years. Once again GISS data was examined by Steve Mcintyre at "Climate Audit" and another blogger Anthony Watts from the website "Watts Up With That".

As a result of the data review, GISS was again revising information published on its website. Data analysis revealed that Russia was recorded as unusually warm. The reason for all that October warmth was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not actually based on October readings at all. Figures from September had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

A GISS spokesman explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from NOAA and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with.

Global temperature published by GISS are one of the four data sets that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming. The truth is that GISS consistently shows higher temperatures than any of the others.

The fact is that it was not a record warm October and the planet has been cooling for the last few years. Unfortunately, for the second straight year, NASA is embarrassed by a lack of quality control at GISS. The basis of science is making sure that the evidence is accurate before any conclusion is made.

So, a lack of quality control over data is a sad excuse. The real truth is that a record warm October was an erroneous conclusion based on inaccurate information. It has left NASA's credibility on global climate change out in the cold, for the second year in row.