Politicians meeting in Copenhagen are hoping to decree what the proper global temperature should be. Their concern stems, apart from politics, from a perceived dangerous warming. But, just like in elections, it’s not the voters that determine outcome; it is the vote counters. In the climate game, it appears that actual temperatures, and their relationship to natural cycles, don’t count; it is how the temperatures are presented that fuel concern.

There are three main data sets of global surface temperature. One is kept by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU), the agency under fire for “hiding the decline.” Another is kept by NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GIS). The third, maintained by NOAA , is the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) which is based on physical weather stations. CRU and GIS get most of their raw data from the GHCN and then make “adjustments.” Sometimes the adjustments are legitimate such as when a station moves or gets new instrumentation. But almost all the adjustments have resulted in more warming than shown by the raw data. That is highly unlikely if the adjustments are legitimate. Two examples:

The following two graphs show NASA’s adjustment to the Santa Rosa, CA, station (which happens to be at the headquarters of NOAA).

 The following is what the folks at CRU did with the GHCN data from the airport at Darwin, Australia. In this graph, the blue is the raw data, the red is the adjusted data.

This makes one wonder if we really know what the temperatures, and the keepers of the temperatures, are doing. It also makes one wonder if politicians are basing policy on fact or fiction.