Obama NASA Adjusts Temperatures Again to Increase Rate of Rise

The claim that global temperatures are rising at unprecedented and disastrous rates due to fossil fuel use lies at the root of numerous Obama policies harmful to our economy.  Among them are:

• Forcing coal-fired power plants to implement much more rigorous efforts to remove trace amounts of mercury and to sequester CO2 emissions.  Though these regulations are not to take effect until after the election, they are forcing the shutdown of power plants and coal mining operations now.
• The refusal to approve the building of the Keystone XL pipeline.
• The slowdown and minimization of permits to develop oil and gas on federal lands, which are extremely large areas of the Western US.
• The prohibition of offshore leases off the Pacific, Atlantic, and Eastern Gulf of Mexico.
• New federal regulations on fracking which were issued in April.
• New regulations on emissions from refineries, causing them new expenses.
• The new CAFE requirement that cars and light-duty trucks must average 54.5 mpg by 2025.
• Heavy subsidies for electric cars that no one wants even given the subsidy, thereby forcing DOD and other government agencies to buy these undesirable cars.
• Heavy subsidies and mandates requiring the use of electricity from wind, solar, biomass and other green energy which are greatly increasing electricity costs and decreasing the electric grid reliability.

These policies are all made to seem more justified if the rate of the temperature increase in the more recent years can be enhanced and prior temperatures can be suppressed.  In light of this, Randell Hoven very recently discovered that NASA changed their database of global temperatures, once again, going back to 1880.   Some time between early July and September 2012, NASA changed the entire temperature record going back to 1880, with no announcement and no statement with the database.  The biggest changes were to the data prior to 1963 and those changes were generally decreases in the temperature.  The post-1963 temperatures were mostly increased.  This caused the 131-year trend to increase from 0.60 to 0.64 C per century.  While this is a small change, it replicates many earlier temperature adjustments, which generally depressed the earlier temperatures and raised the more recent temperatures.  There appears to be a systematic bias in the temperature adjustments.

Note that the direction of these changes seems very improbable. One would think one of the biggest effects that would require temperature adjustments would be the urban heat island effect.  The population around the world has generally increased greatly since 1880, so there should be downward corrections to compensate for that effect on weather stations in populated areas as the populations grow.  The urban heat island effect adjustments should be all the greater on recent temperature data since many rural temperature stations have been removed from the sensing system and urban stations are now a much increased fraction of the stations submitting data.  Among my earlier posts dealing with the problems of urban heat island effects and adjustments to skew the record toward greater relative temperature increases in recent times are those here, here, here, here, and here.

Hoven notes that despite the temperature changes, the first 8 months of 2012 make it the tenth hottest year in the 131 year record, every month of 1998 was hotter than the corresponding month of 2012, except for tied records in May, and the global trend since 2002 is one of cooling.  And Antarctica has the highest sea ice record ever observed.

The pressure on the Obama NASA to make temperature adjustments to help justify his many economy killing actions might well be very severe in these final weeks before the November election.  At this point, after years of opaqueness on the part of the Obama administration, it is no surprise to have another surprise adjustment of the temperature record to hype the alarmist claims of catastrophic man-made global warming.  After all, one really does need a justification for putting hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of people out of work or preventing them from getting the jobs that would be created if we took good advantage of America's abundant fossil fuel energy resources.  For more on how abundant our fossil fuel resources are, see here, here, and here.