NASA Caught Publishing Phoney-Baloney Global Warming Data

And they got caught by a couple of bloggers to boot.

GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs – run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious “hockey stick” graph – GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic – in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

What’s interesting is that NASA’s attempt to defend itself actually further undermines it as a source for sound, objective analysis of this issue:

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen’s institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

Dr. Hansen’s research is probably the most widely cited because Hansen himself is a chief ally of one Albert Gore who routinely cites the data in his delusional climate change crusade.
So what does all this mean for the average citizen who is a little overwhelmed by all this inside baseball? First, that the “authorities” on global warming know a lot less about it than they’d like you to know about. Second, because of that last point, we should hardly be implementing drastic policy changes (like bankrupting the coal industry, for instance, I’m looking at you President-elect Obama) based on this data. And finally, that we should question the motives of those who are rabid in their exaggerations of global warming data.
Because most of those people aren’t so much out to save the planet as they’re out to manipulate us into giving them more power and prestige.