Great Commentary On The GISS Flub

Since the GISS revised its data there's been debate, meaningful or not meaningful? A blip but irrelevant and warming is still happening, or a major blow to the Gore ilk? A blow to those oil-funded... ah whatever I am just still irked by the Newsweek flub.

The key argument here lies with the fact that the data is US-specific... and we're less than 5% of global landmass. The argument, then, is that its not relevant. The article makes a great case otherwise.

Anyway read the editorial and decide for yourself - only 2 pages - here's an excerpt (full article here):

But, notes Canadian mathematician Stephen McIntyre, who exposed the false figures, “The Hansen error . . . has a significant impact on the GISS estimate of U.S. temperature history . . .” (Emphasis added.) Is this important because we’re a major world power or that we produce the best fried chicken? No, it’s important because we have a far more sophisticated system of temperature monitoring than countries with far larger land masses. Hence, data from each of these nations affect the global model more than the American data.

“Many of the stations in China, Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere are in urban areas,” observes McIntyre. This can produce hotter temperatures, yet some of the major trackers of the data from these countries, including the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, make no attempt to adjust for monitor placement errors. In any event, for some reason “the U.S. history has a rather minimal (warming) trend if any since the 1930s, while the ROW [rest of the world] has a very pronounced trend since the 1930s.”

Thus if the U.S. model, by far the most accurate one, became the model, it would be a gut punch to those claiming we must take drastic, horrifically expense measures right now to ameliorate warming.

----> FULL TEXT OF THE ARTICLE HERE