The NYT article failed to capture McIntyre's obvious concern about NASA accuracy, opacity and apparent disregard of UHI. The author tried to gloss this over as being a problem with the blogosphere, not with the NASA methodology.

The fact that the 1930s was the warmest decade in the US is hardly trivial in light of the endless "sky is falling rhetoric", and I find it astonishing that some AGW advocates can delude themselves into ignoring this gigantic hole in their gospel.

Another great audit post showing how Hansen changed his data between 1999 and 2001
http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/hans_k2.gif

Brett,
There is so much data, and statistical information out there concerning past temperature reconstructions that one could fill a 10,000 page book in the process. Climate Audit is just one site; however, I think the author of the blog goes out of his way to answer questions and criticisms, and unlike RealClimate, he does not normally censor posts. Here are a few quick snippets from the the posts you refer to:

"Values in the 2000s are elevated and 95% �statistical significance� is not the only relevant metric for data analysis. However, if people are making claims of statistical significance, it�s fair enough to analyze these claims. The issues remaining to the validity of the NOAA and NASA adjustments remain outstanding. What impact do HO-83 hygrothermometers have on this? Has urbanization and microsite effects been properly accounted for - not just in the U.S. record but in Brazil and China and elsewhere? These issues remain outstanding."

and

"GISS has emphasized recently that the U.S. constitutes only 2% of global land surface, arguing that the impact of the error is negligible on the global averagel. While this may be so for users of the GISS global average, U.S. HCN stations constitute about 50% of active (with values in 2004 or later) stations in the GISS network (as shown below). The sharp downward step in station counts after March 2006 in the right panel shows the last month in which USHCN data is presently included in the GISS system. The Hansen error affects all the USHCN stations and, to the extent that users of the GISS system are interested in individual stations, the number of affected stations is far from insignificant, regardless of the impact on global averages."

Steve McIntyre also allows downloading of the data he uses as well as the source code he uses to plot his graphs.

The bottom line IMHO, is that McIntyre has again called into serious question past temperature reconstructions. What he did to Mann's use of Principle Components Analysis, he is doing to NOAA, NASA and HadCrut's temperature analysis. This is important as the Hockey Stick is still alive and well without Mann's PCAs. The entire question of how and why these public institutions created the "unprecedented" warming of the last 15-20 years now can take place in public. Of course, NOAA and Hadley continue to keep thier databases and methodologies private. McIntyre is making this practice harder and harder.

In NASA�s most recent data set, 1934 had followed 1998 by a statistically meaningless 0.018 degrees.

Now 1934 is ahead of 1998 as the warmest year on record for the US by another statistically meaningless 0.036 degrees Fahrenheit.

What tends to get lost is that this is only for the US, which is 2% of the Globe. The Warmest Year for the Globe is 2005 and the Arctic which is warming faster than anywhere else because of feedback from melting snow and ice.

So, all these number adjustments do not change the record low levels of summer sea ice in the Arctic, continuously rising sea levels or the steadily increasing areas of melt in Greenland.

Global Warming is simply not going to go away anytime soon.

Also, do not miss the fact that China is now the largest CO2 emitter. They have coal mines on fire that they can not put out that emit just about as much CO2 as the US transportation sector and do not wish to have any curbs on their emissions.

Meanwhile, the US actually decreased emissions last year.

Andrew,

Sure, the U.S. only accounts for 2% of the land area of the globe, but harping on that is just a way to distract from the main significance of what Steve McIntyre (with Anthony Watts) has demonstrated, namely, that the "observational record" upon which our perception of climate change is based itself needs to be examined critically, because it is subject to manipulation (for better or worse) by scientists like Hansen. So far, they've only been able to look at the U.S. records, and have only begun to do even that. There's every reason to expect equally big problems with the the data from the rest of the world.

And antarctica is growing in extent (although this also is probably normal variation over 200 years etc) The point is that if abnormal warming is at all occuring, it appears to confined to the northern latitudes of the Northern hemisphere. It seems more like an urban island/population/pollution effect and data/stations etc needs to be re-checked as per ClimateAudit. Rural data in the southern hemisphere does not appear to show any significant warming whatsoever as per GISS or other satellite data. Correct me if I am wrong. VG

American CO2 emissions went global a while ago, Andrew, so closing industry here should not be applauded as a step forward which has resulted in lower local co2 emissions.

American manufacturing went off shore and now takes place in China increasing the emission load significantly and globally when our goods are imported here and our recyclable waste is returned to Asia. This may keep our backyard cleaner but over all, global warming will not be affected by the cheap options of industrial relocation

A large proportion of the goods imported are of the plugin variety loaded into the trucks also made in China that take the stock between port and US market. Consumers then demand more electricity to fuel the home appliances so that the cheaply made Chinese bargains can improve the lifestyles of the poor trapped folks who go shopping to buy a Chinese made Air/con to cope with global warming.

Patrick seems to be exploring any crack in AGW science, which is a good thing, as the 1934/1998 storm in a tea cup actually supports AGW fears because unlike the 1934, a warm year (in America), the last two decades globally have experienced increasing warming and sustained climate change which did not occur in Patrick�s favourite pre war, pre consumerism and pre industrial deforestation era.

I think this shows that the sceptic�s camp must start a new campaign to quantify rather than stick with this silly outright denial of global warming. Their next step might be to admit that co2 contributes to GW , compare annual natural global emissions with the man made co2 overburden in an effort to discount human responsibility. Once this apples for sea cucumber style of comparisons start, the argument using the respectable services of accuweather.com must end.

How can nature compete with human activity? We have burnt the geosequestered carbon deposits from billions of years of volcanic activity and impaired natures geosequestering process by deforesting the globe and polluting its seas. How can this destruction ever be repaired?

What difference can there be in cutting emissions through Kyoto style agreements when developing nations achieve the status quo regardless of any local reductions?

The focus should not be how can we avert global warming or if we can continue to deny it, the focus should be how can we educate the survivors so that they do not make the same mistake in the future.

What he did to Mann's use of Principle Components Analysis, he is doing to NOAA, NASA and HadCrut's temperature analysis.

Agreed -- he's attempting to swiftboat them.

Mann's hockey-stick is still alive and well because McIntyre's attack was demonstrated to be a meaningless political charade. I'm reminded of the late Edward Teller's similarly disgusting advocacy of hydrogen-powered anything, including Reagan's inept "star wars" fantasy. JP seems to prefer McIntyre in the role of right-wing attack-dog.

Our local cast of deniers apparently hopes nobody will notice that:

1) "Mr. McIntyre and Dr. Hansen agree [on] the merit of shifting away from energy choices that contribute heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere."

2) "Mr. McIntyre said he feels 'climate change is a serious issue.' His personal preference is to shift increasingly to nuclear power and away from coal and oil, the main source of heat-trapping carbon dioxide."

3) "Mr. McIntyre and Dr. Hansen also agree that the NASA data glitch had no effect on the global temperature trend, nudging it by an insignificant thousandth of a degree."

4) "Everyone appears also to agree that too much attention is paid to records, particularly given that the difference between 1934, 1998, and several other sets of years in the top 10 warmest list for the United States are so small as to be statistically meaningless."

Apparently our deniers are too busy cheerleading to pay attention to the increasingly-obvious facts.

unlike RealClimate, he does not normally censor posts.

In other words, McIntyre's site -- like this one -- allows deniers to repeat the same lies, distortions, and half-truths ad infinitum.

Like the creationists, the deniers conveniently ignore the 99.9% of the established theory, data, and simple facts in order to focus on whichever 0.1% has enough noise in it to support that day's talking points. Like all noise, it changes constantly, is virtually always inconsistent with itself, and has no long-term theoretical or observational foundation. The deniers seem to rely on volume, bluster, and sheer repetition to obscure these obvious failures.

For example, our own crew here can't seem to keep track of whether CO2 is or is not a GHG, or whether variation in solar irradiance is or is not a factor, or my personal favorite, the "Milankovitch cycle".

These three canards have been utterly and completely demolished since the 80s. All but a handful of crackpots, cranks and charlatans have long since moved on, and have zero patience and/or time to constantly revisit these long-settled non-issues. Each falls in the same league as the creationists spurious claim that "there is no proof of 'macro' evolution".

Censorship? I think a more accurate term is "editing". Unfortunately, like "Debbie Does Dallas" without the hard-core parts, when you finish editing the canards out of the incessant flamethrowing from the denier machine, there's just not much left.

So now the "devastating" rise is only .21 degrees. How can anybody possibly be alarmed at this? And how can they continue to deny that most if not all of this is natural?
As far as China's rising CO2 count, don't let it bother you, it's not going to make a difference either way.

Looks like Global temperatures have warmed up since 1998 anyways.

The global surface temperature for the combined January to July year to date period tied with 2002 and 2005 as the second warmest January to July on record, while the global land surface temperature ranked warmest on record for January to July 2007.

July 2007 ranked as the seventh warmest July since records began in 1880 for combined global land and ocean surface temperatures.

July land surface temperature ranked fifth warmest on record.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/jul/global.html#temp

Andrew,

"Global Warming is simply not going to go away anytime soon."

Do you have any evidence? If C02 traps in the rays of the sun then doesn't it also keep them out at the same time? Wouldn't this be an equal and stable process, and it wouldn't matter how much C02 is in our atmosphere? I don't undertstand how the rays get in but can't get out, they move the same speed whether coming from a reflective surface or the sun itself. Correct me if im wrong, please.

Andrew,
A careful reading of the not only McIntyre's recent work, but also of Watt's microsite analysis of the US Co-op network reveals that a 0.18 C adjustment is anything but meaningless. The USCN stations used by GISS comprise 50% of thier global network, even though the US comprises only 2% of the global landmass. To compound the issue, NOAA, NASA, and HadCrut's databases are comprised of mainly of what are referred to as urban reporting stations (that is, for stations in Europe and China. The US is mix of both urbana and rural); McIntyre did audit for instance, of the 6 Brazillian reporting stations and found that 4 of them were urban; yet, niether of the above mentioned climate organizations adjusted down those urban station's temperatures. McIntyre compared the 2 rural sites with the urban sites, and found significant variability between them. He also discovered that NOAA adjusts coastal reporting stations upward based on the variance between the coastal stations and inland stations as far away as 1000km. This is very significant as stations positioned on the West Coast of Continents are under the influence of oceanic upwelling. Anyone who visits San Francisco in the summer expirences this upwelling as San Francisco can be only 60 degrees in an August afternoon, while Death Valley, Palm Sprngs, or Travis Air Force Base are well over 100. NOAA, adjusts San Francisco's cool temperatures upward based on reporting stations with a completely different geographical and microsite enviorment. This isn't just bad science, it is downright dishonest. Kind of like getting rid of the MWP or the 1930 temperature optimum.

The question here is not Global Warming -it never was. The question is one of degree. The globe has been warming since the coldest years of the LIA -that is since 1667. What is becoming clearer every day is that the "unprecedented warming" of the last 20 years is nothing more than a statistical sleight of hand.

I watched the climate program with Heidi Cullen last night and they showed a graphic of the Atlantic warming. No scale - just color. The warming from JANUARY to JULY was alarming - from blue to yellow-orange. At least it didn't go to red. That would really be bad.

Then I watched some of Tom Brokaw on discovery. He told how Hansen had predicted the rise in temperatures years ago. He modeled it and was accurate with one tenth of a degree - OMG. One tenth of a degree. Why are we spending so much money on models when we already are good to 1 tenth of a degree.

Then some clown came on and said that CO2 levels could increase 7X. I couldn't watch anymore.

Simon,

I would suggest watching this video that will air in November on ABC here in the US. I believe it has already aired on the BBC.

http://www.conservativethinking.com/archives/2007/08/the-great-global-warming-swindle.php

They make very compelling arguments showing that it is solar activity causing the slight increase in temperatures we are seeing, not CO2. And that the increase will not be the terrible catastrophe that Al Gore is trying to make everyone think is going to happen.

BT,
McIntyre is a professional statistician. AGW proponents use statistics to butress thier claims. Mann, who admits he isn't a statistician, mis-used a form of statistical analysis. McIntyre and others simply pointed out his poor mathematics. Dr Wegeman, one of the preeminent statisticians in the world, gave testimony to this fact before Congress and the NAS.

Scientists use the mathematical tools available when constructing theories. What Mann did wasn't unusual. Even Einstein had to learn Tensor Analysis in order to derive his relativistic field equations. If in 1906, a mathmatician from Goettigen University, found that Einstein mis-used Tensor Calculus, and he wrote a paper detailing his criticism, said mathmatician wouldn't be Swiftboating Einstein, but performing a vital function to the scientific community. Phyisicists today use advanced forms of Differential Equations to solve all kinds of problems, and it isn't unusual for some to make mistakes. I took Differential Equations in school and can attest to this.

The critiques pertaining to Mann's PC1 remain open; Mann simply ignores and dismisses his detractors. Here is where Peer Review has failed Climate Science. Not one person in the field questioned Mann's MBH9x studies -it took 2 Canadian outsiders to do the due diligence. Who knows, maybe Mann's Hockey Stick is in fact valid. If it is, it is up to Mann to defend mathematically his analysis. But don't take my word for it; you can go to climate audit and download in R Script all of McIntyre's analysis and go over it with a fine tooth comb. You can even post questions -even antagonistic questions about any of McIntyre's and McKitrick's work. You won't be censored.

Andrew;

"Now 1934 is ahead of 1998 as the warmest year on record for the US by another statistically meaningless 0.036 degrees Fahrenheit."

It wasn't meaningless until the dates were switched. That's called "moving the goalposts". Here is McIntyre:
"Readers might perform a little thought experiment: suppose that Spencer and Christy had published a temperature history in which they claimed that 1934 was the warmest U.S. year on record and then it turned out that they had been a computer programming error opposite to the one that Hansen made, that Wentz and Mears discovered there was an error of 0.15 deg C in the Spencer and Christy results and, after fiixing this error, it turned out that 2006 was the warmest year on record. Would realclimate simply describe this as a �very minor re-arrangement�?"

"What tends to get lost is that this is only for the US, which is 2% of the Globe."

And the records, we all know, for the remaining 98% are spot on, right? McIntyre again:

One more story to conclude. Non-compliant surface stations were reported in the formal academic literature by Pielke and Davey (2005) who described a number of non-compliant sites in eastern Colorado. In NOAA�s official response to this criticism, Vose et al (2005) said in effect -

it doesn�t matter. It�s only eastern Colorado. You haven�t proved that there are problems anywhere else in the United States.

In most businesses, the identification of glaring problems, even in a restricted region like eastern Colorado, would prompt an immediate evaluation to ensure that problems did not actually exist. However, that does not appear to have taken place and matters rested until Anthony Watts and the volunteers at surfacestations.org launched a concerted effort to evaluate stations in other parts of the country and determined that the problems were not only just as bad as eastern Colorado, but in some cases were much worse.

Now in response to problems with both station quality and adjustment software, Schmidt and Hansen say in effect, as NOAA did before them -

it doesn�t matter. It�s only the United States. You haven�t proved that there are problems anywhere else in the world.

msrund

Ocean temps from Jan. to July going from blue to yellow-orange. Did you ever stop and think for a minute that they are merely showing a seasonal change in ocean temps from winter to summer? Nothing is out of the ordinary for that. Now look for them to show July to Jan. and you will see it go from yellow-orange to blue again. No, not an ice age just seasonal change. Heidi is the hyping the situation and that is why The Weather Channel's ratings have gone way down.

JP, we've had this exchange so many times that I wonder why I bother continuing it.

McIntyre found some minor problems in Mann's paper. I posted, months ago, a long list of citations for various papers that showed that those minor corrections had no effect on the conclusions of Mann's work. Mann's results have been tested and replicated, multiple times. The fact that the far right, including McIntyre, continue to relentlessly repeat their criticism says more about the political axe they grind (and the extent to which they depend on the resulting cash) than about ANY technical aspect of this long-dead horse. In the famous words of Upton Sinclair "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

The swiftboating isn't in the fine detail of the accurate analysis McIntyre performed -- all parties long since acknowledged the shortcomings and made corrections. The swiftboating is in the effort to present those minor corrections as major flaws -- just as McIntyre is now attempting to do with the temperature data.

You presumably refer to Tullio Levi-Civita in your reference to the corrections of Einstein's errors in tensor analysis. I think it's worth noting that the errors were not minor and that they initiated a long and friendly correspondence. I find the comparison to McIntyre and Mann (or McIntyre and Hansen) both inappropriate and misleading.

Editing comments that offer no substantive value or that perpetuate canards that have long since been accepted as disproven by all but the most extreme fringe is not "censorship", it's "editing". It's what any responsible editor or publisher does. It's what distinguishes the Wall Street Journal from the New York Post.

Calling such editing "censorship" is, sadly, the modus operandi of people such as Lyndon LaRouche, Tim Ball, William Gray, and their ilk.

BT

"Agreed -- he's attempting to swiftboat them."

I'm pretty sure that your definition of Swiftboating is presenting a viewpoint that you disagree with.

The reverse is the overused liberal term "talking truth to power."

Truly useful roads go in two directions.

"So now the "devastating" rise is only .21 degrees. How can anybody possibly be alarmed at this? And how can they continue to deny that most if not all of this is natural?"

No one is alarmed at the present warming, but it (past and present emissions) does commit us to an additional 0.7C warming. The real concern is if we add an additional 1C or more on top of this. If Global Warming were only about a 0.21C temperature rise it would be no big deal.

"Do you have any evidence? If C02 traps in the rays of the sun then doesn't it also keep them out at the same time? Wouldn't this be an equal and stable process, and it wouldn't matter how much C02 is in our atmosphere? I don't undertstand how the rays get in but can't get out, they move the same speed whether coming from a reflective surface or the sun itself. Correct me if im wrong, please."

Sure. You are wrong. The Earth reflects more infrared radiation out to space than reaches its surface from the Sun. The Earth reflects less visible light to space than reaches its surface from the Sun. A CO2 molecule (like all greenhouse gases) is more transparent to visible light than it is infrared radiation. Thus, the "Greenhouse Effect". See Venus for a more graphic example of where ignoring science and reality will take us.

Do not believe McIntyre is a professional statistician. Instead, he is a retired oil executive.

Anyhow, the work he is doing is good. I work in a field subject to heavy audits and assessment too and it is considered a strength to have them and when error are quickly corrected. The opposite, where there are no checks or if there are any they are meet with opposition and denial is a sign that there may be lots of hidden problems.

Darren,

CO2 traps radiation coming from the earth in the infrared part of the spectrum.

Sunlight is mostly visible radiation and passes thru CO2 without significant reduction.

Since CO2 affects the radiation leaving the earth so much more than the sunlight entering the earths atmosphere, it resu