Global Warming Takes a Hit

According to the NOAA, we’re in the 70th warmest October in the last 114 years, yet a NASA scientist with strong connections to Al Gore announced that it was the hottest October on record.

What’s the discrepancy? 

Apparently, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies was carrying climatological data over from the previous two months, assigning August and September data to October. 

The type of error is inexcusable, especially given the sensitive nature of such findings. I would rather believe that this was intentionally perpetrated by Dr. James Hansen, the administrator of the Goddard Institute for Space Science. The alternative is to admit that this arm of NASA is so poorly run, with such poor quality control over data analysis/reporting, that they missed such an obvious gaffe. This sort of error, given the cooperative nature of most research teams and the need to check, re-check, and check again experiments and stastistical data is little short of remarkable.

My choice to believe that this is intentional is perhaps more troubling, simply because our new priesthood, the scientific elite, is engaging in the same type of shell games that organized religion has used for the past two thousand years. Many of our citizens don’t have the background or the education to evaluate this data for themselves, and so must accept the interpretations of those in positions of authority. (Sound Catholic to anyone else?)  At the very least, the true perpetrators should be censured in the scientific community. Given the possibilities, this is a fitting punishment for both negligence and intentional falsification of data.

The questions that we should all be asking ourselves, especially heading into a period of nanny-state government: Is one of our most prestigious scientific posts fraught with incompetence? Or are we finally seeing hard evidence that the message of global warming is being intentionally shaped by those with a personal agenda that has little to do with hard science?