It is time for an independent investigation of whether or to what degree human activities are creating catastrophic global warming. It should be conducted by scientists untainted by advocacy and uncompromised through receiving taxes or private funding to advance or debunk the theory.
Many in the new Congress were elected on promises to re-evaluate global warming claims used to justify Draconian regulations. A “team of nongovernment and non-U.N. experts must be established with access to all the raw data, records, adjustments, fudges … and computer codes currently being black-boxed by government scientists,” says Robert Ferguson, president of the nonprofit Science and Public Policy Institute for “sound public policy based on sound science.” We agree.
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have resisted Freedom of Information Act requests for release of unadjusted raw data and documentation of their adjustments to them. Good science requires theories be tested.
Even proponents of catastrophic manmade global warming theory say the average global temperature increased 0.7 degrees Celsius over the past century. We must be certain such tiny changes and the cataclysmic predictions based on them are valid before imposing huge economic sacrifices, infringing personal freedoms or levying new taxes.
A good place to start is temperature data. NASA and NOAA, which together receive nearly half a billion dollars a year in tax funding for climate research, “have been systematically fiddling the worldwide temperature record for years, making ‘global warming’ look worse than it is,” according to a new paper by meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, an American Meteorology Society fellow.
“(W)hen data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data” to agree with models’ projections, says MIT meteorologist Dr. Richard Lindzen.
Research by meteorologist Anthony Watts found 11 percent of U.S. ground temperature stations meet NASA’s own standards for the required distance between stations and adjacent heat sources, seriously compromising readings. That’s before NASA “adjusts” the raw data, adding more significant additional false warming, Mr. Watts says.
“The raw temperature data produced by the … stations are not sufficiently accurate to use in scientific studies or as a basis for public policy decisions,” he concludes.
Thousands of e-mails leaked in 2009 from Britain’s Climate Research Unit showed researchers lamented the “hapless state” of their temperature records, including “hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy and duplicate stations,” and “no uniform data integrity.”
CRU Director Phil Jones later conceded “temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated,” bringing into question the U.S. records because, “almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same.”
An independent analysis also should be made of climate computer models and the purported cause-and-effect relationships assumed between greenhouse gases and higher temperature, rising sea levels and melting glaciers.
