In an interview with the BBC, Phil Jones, the head of the British Climatic Research Unit at the heart of ClimateGate, told the BBC: the recent warming trend that began in 1975 is not statistically different from two other planetary warming phases since 1850; there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995, and; it is possible the Medieval Warm Period was indeed a global phenomenon thereby making the temperatures seen in the latter part of the 20th century by no means unprecedented. Jones also explained why he manipulated the data to “hide the decline.”

The BBC interview: http://tinyurl.com/yb9h7vd

Chris Horner, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, filed a freedom of information request to NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), in August 2007. Finally on Dec. 31, 2009 NASA complied with the request and released emails and other documents.

According to Horner, “The emails show the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and suspect data management and integrity of NASA, wildly spinning in defense of their enterprise. The emails show NASA making off with enormous sums of taxpayer funding doing precisely what they claim only a “skeptic” would do. The emails show NASA attempting to scrub their website of their own documents, and indeed they quietly pulled down numerous press releases grounded in the proven-wrong data. The emails show NASA claiming that their own temperature errors (which they have been caught making and in uncorrected form aggressively promoting) are merely trivial, after years of hysterically trumpeting much smaller warming anomalies.”

Horner article part 1 here: http://tinyurl.com/ylkkq76

NASA emails here: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/business/foia/GISS.html

One of my pet peeves is with advertisers that offer “free gifts” but impose an obligation to collect them, or say you can get something free, “just pay shipping and handling,” or “free gift with purchase.”

While this form of up-selling may be legitimate, I think companies should not be allowed to offer “gifts” or something “free” unless it really is offered without obligation.

I recently put this to a test. I subscribe to Reader’s Digest magazine. For the past three months, my magazine came with a card that offered “3 Free Gifts.” RD provided a website where I could go to collect the “3 free gifts.” Upon visiting the website, I found that I could download a cookbook for free, but for the other two “gifts” I would have to sign up for a book club. I wrote to Reader’s Digest about this matter but never received a response.

Since the headquarters of Reader’s Digest is in New York, I wrote to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. He replied within a week saying he was forwarding my complaint to the proper department. A week after that, I received a letter from Karine Patino of the New York Bureau of Consumer Frauds and Protection. She wrote, “I am forwarding your complaint to the company to request a statement of their position and a possible adjustment.” Maybe just the inquiry from the New York Attorney General will cause Reader’s Digest to rethink their advertising methods. I would have no problem with RD offering a bonus for trying their book club.

Arizona Attorney General, Terry Goddard, also mentions scams involving “gifts” in his office’s brochure “Ten Top Consumer Scams.” (See: http://www.azag.gov/consumer/TopTenScams.pdf )

Goddard mentions that some auto dealers “Advertised minimum trade-in amounts and free gifts. Dealers may raise the price of the car to offset a low value trade-in or the cost of the gift.”

Caveat Emptor.

Do you wordsmiths out there have any phrases you would like to see disappear – phrase such as “very unique,” or “past history,”  “terrible tragedy,”  or even the one I used, “pet peeves?”

The Science and Public Policy Institute has published a paper on Surface Temperature Records, in which the authors document the following points:

1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.

2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.

3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.

4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.

5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.

6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.

7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.

8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.

9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.

10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.

11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century “global warming”.

12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.

13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.

14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC “chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”

15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.

A PDF file of this 111-page report is available here:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf