NASA Data Worse Than Climate-Gate Data, Space Agency Admits

.Excerpts From Fox News - March 30, 2010

And the problems with Climate change data continue: NASA put a man on the moon, but it can't tell you what the temperature was when it did. By its own admission, NASA's temperature records are worse than the Climate-gate data.

...NASA concluded that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) - the source of leaked Climate-gate e-mails - and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center...

"NASA's temperature data is worse than the Climate-gate temperature data. According to NASA," wrote Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who uncovered the e-mails. Horner is skeptical of NCDC's data as well, stating plainly: "Three out of the four temperature data sets stink."

Global warming advocates have argued that minor flaws in "Climate-gate" data aren't important, since all the major data sets arrive at the same conclusion -- Global warming. But skeptics say there's a good reason for that: They all use the same data.

James M. Taylor, senior fellow of environment policy at The Heartland Institute. said,
"There is far too much overlap among the surface temperature data sets to assert with a straight face that they independently verify each other's results."

"The different groups have cooperated in a very friendly way to try to understand different conclusions when they arise," said Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in the same 2007 e-mail thread. GISS had previously stated that separate analyses by the different agencies "are not independent, as they must use much of the same input observations." (Dr. James Hansen is also one of the head scientists that Senator Inhofe has wanted to call in for questioning in relation to falsified data.)

...Corrections are needed, Dr. Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground, said, "since there are only a few thousand surface temperature recording sites with records going back 100+ years." As such, climate agencies estimate temperatures in various ways for areas where there aren't any thermometers, to account for the overall incomplete global picture.
...But NASA is less confident, having quietly decided to tweak its corrections to the climate data... In an updated analysis of the surface temperature data released on March 19, 2010, NASA 'adjusted' raw temperature station data to account for inaccurate readings caused by heat-absorbing paved surfaces and buildings in a slightly different way.

Wrong placement of the temperature stations is a problem repeatedly underscored by meteorologist Anthony Watts on his SurfaceStations.org Web site. Last month, Watts told FoxNews.com that "90 percent 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. Ninety percent of them failed that, and we've got documentation."

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