Hiding NASA Decline
April 2, 2010
Climate Change: The agency that put Americans on the moon can't tell you the temperature that day. It isn't returning to the moon, but it will fix the brakes on your car. Two senators want to know what's going on.
The scandal unfolding at the nation's space agency is worse than the climate scandal, where researchers with Britain's Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia manipulated, destroyed and doctored climate data so that it supported the preordained conclusion that climate change was an imminent threat caused by man.
If there is any doubt, just ask NASA.
E-mail messages obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that NASA concluded its own climate findings were inferior to the CRU analysis. In one e-mail from 2007, when a USA Today reporter asked if NASA's data "was more accurate," NASA's Dr. Reto Ruedy responded with an emphatic no.
"NASA's temperature data is worse than the Climate-gate temperature data. According to NASA," writes Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who uncovered the e-mails. Indeed, NASA's record shows it fudged data and cherry-picked data sources.
Concerned about the validity of NASA's climate research data, Sens. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., and David Vitter, R-La., sent a letter to space agency chief Charles Bolden demanding answers and inviting Bolden to testify to the Senate on the credibility of NASA's data.
"The American people deserve to learn the truth about the data," Barrasso told FoxNews.com. "We shouldn't make decisions affecting millions of American jobs when the data isn't credible."
Particularly when NASA is admitting it isn't.
Barrasso and Vitter refer to a Feb. 27 study by former NASA physicist Edward Long. Long concluded that NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), run by Al Gore's favorite scientist, Dr. James Hansen, had been modifying data, "lowering temperature values for far-back dates and raising those in the more recent past."
Meteorologist Anthony Watts, on his SurfaceStations.org, has documented the inaccuracy of weather station data used by NASA. Watts says that "90% of them don't meet (the government's) old, simple rule called the '100-foot rule' for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence."
As we've reported, many U.S. stations are in places such as paved driveways, near rooftop exhaust vents, even near idling jet engines.
The number of weather stations used to calculate average global temperatures has declined from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 currently. The number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35.
The stations remaining tend to be in warmer, urbanized areas, distorting the climate picture. Data for unmonitored areas are simply extrapolated from other, often far away, stations.
NASA was caught with its thermometers down when Hansen breathlessly announced in 2007 that 1998 was the hottest year on record, with 2006 the third hottest. NASA and GISS were forced to correct their report in 2007 when ClimateAudit.com's Steve McIntyre questioned the underlying data.
NASA then announced that 1934, decades before the SUV, was in fact the warmest. The new numbers show that four of the country's 10 warmest years were in the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939. Five of the hottest 10 occurred before World War II.
Hansen, who began the climate scare some two decades ago, was caught fudging the numbers again in declaring October 2008 the warmest on record. This was despite the fact the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month and ranked it as only the 70th warmest October in 114 years.
Meanwhile, NASA, where budget cuts have shelved plans to return to the moon, has announced it will help investigate Toyota's unintended acceleration problems.
If there's anything we should be applying the brakes on, it should be NASA's continued fudging of climate truth.
