Climate Fudge Factor

James Hansen, who's skill at manipulating climate data should not be in question (and not in a good way) is at it again. His team released data claiming that Russia saw massive temperature increases in October.

Then other experts decided to take a closer look at the data. They found something real strange.

The October data was identical to the September data for the Russian information. In other words, September was September and October for the Russian portion of the results, and it totally skewed the outcome of the data run. He and his team used the exact same data for both months, and since October is colder than September generally, the differential was all the more extreme (and should have been all the more obvious).

Actually, many stations didn't just experience similar absolute monthly temperatures. Many stations had exactly the same monthly temperatures in October as in September. Here are the last three years for the Russian station, Olenek, showing NASA GISS monthly temperatures (in deg C) bolding Sept and Oct 2008. October 2007 had an average temperature of -9 deg C, as compared to 3.1 deg C in Sept 2007. October 2008 had the identical temperature as September 2008.

YEAR JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC
2006 -34.0 -29.9 -23.5 -18.1 1.6 10.6 16.9 11.5 4.4 -14.6 -27.7 -29.1
2007 -27.9 -41.5 -21.6 -4.0 0.1 12.4 13.5 11.3 3.1 -9.0 -24.8 999.9
2008 -30.0 -29.4 -19.6 -13.4 1.3 12.0 13.1 12.1 3.1 3.1 999.9 999.9

This exact match of October 2008 to September 2008 was repeated at many other Russian stations. A CA reader notified me of this phenomenon earlier today and I've confirmed for myself that the information is accurate. Based on what he described as a "Cursory" look, he sent me the following list currently "updated" stations that exactly replicate the Sept data: Almaty, Omsk, Salehard, Semipalatinsk, Turuhansk, Tobol'sk, Verhojansk, Viljujsk, Vilnius, Vologda. I can add Hatanga, Suntora, GMO ImEKF. Not all stations were affected - Dzerszan, Ostrov Kotal, Jakutsk, Cokurdah appear to have correct results.

Garbage in. Garbage out.

It's one of the reasons that you can't completely trust the statistics coming out of NASA and Hansen's group - they've repeatedly made errors along these lines, and when you model based on bogus or inaccurate data, the results are going to be bogus as well.

Andrew Bolt has much more.