After I WROTE last Sunday about my new book on the global warming scare,The Sunday Telegraph received a request for a correction from Gavin Schmidt, Dr James Hansen' s right-hand man at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. Dr Hansen has been one of the great cheerleaders for the global warming scare ever since his carefully staged shock-horror appearance before a Senate committee in 1988, and is now the man who talks of the "death trains" which carry coal to power stations and wants the chief executives of energy companies put on trial for "high crimes" against humanity. Dr Schmidt wishes us to point out that he is not "involved" in Dr Hansen' s GISS temperature record, which is one of the four official sources of global temperature data relied on by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and by governments all over the world. I am of course happy to publish the correction he asked for, but I am intrigued that Dr Schmidt should want to dissociate himself from this increasingly controversial source of temperature figures. Like others, it seems I was misled by the fact that twice in the past two years, when GISS has come under fire for publishing seriously inaccurate data, it was Dr Schmidt who acted as its public spokesman. The first was in 2007, when Dr Hansen's data was revealed to have been systematically "adjusted" to show recent temperatures as higher than those reported by the other three official sources. This embarrassing business, which resulted in GISS having to revise its figures, was exposed by two science blogs, Watts Up With That, run by Anthony Watts, and Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit. The second intervention came this time last year, when GISS had startlingly shown the previous month as the hottest October on record. The same two expert blogs revealed, as the reason for this improbable spike, that GISS had reproduced many of its September figures for two months running. Dr Schmidt may have had no responsibility for this error, but it was he who was wheeled on to explain this hilarious blunder to the world – with the somewhat curious plea that one of the four official sources relied on by the IPCC did not have sufficient resources to maintain proper quality control on its data. Christopher Booker's 'The Real Global Warming Disaster' (Continuum £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 (plus £1.29 postage and packing). To order call 0844 871 1516 or go to books.telegraph.co.ukGavin Schmidt: a correction
Dr Schmidt wants it known he has no connection with the GISS temperature record, writes Christopher Booker
Sunday, 1 November 2009
Posts
