Governmental Exaggeration of the Increase in Global Temperature

The federal government has systemically increased the global surface temperature record to suit its purpose of claiming that catastrophic man-made global warming has occurred.  Among examples I have pointed out in the past are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for instance.  Steven Goddard at Real Science has just posted an interesting comparison of the surface temperature record used by James Hansen in 1981 with that claimed by GISS now.  He took the two sets of data and normalized them to various dates to show how they differed over other periods of time.  The plot I like the most is the normalization to 1895 which I show below with the black line the data Hansen used in 1981 and the red line the newer, adjusted data of GISS:

Note that the data taken from 1880 to 1940 has curious changes, but no large and continuing differences from the data used earlier.  This would seem to be a concession that the 1880 to 1940 data had only small errors in it.  Then strangely the data from 1940 to 1980 must have originally been very bad and required a large upward adjustment of the temperature record by GISS.  Now one possible reason for an increasing and large adjustment might be a rapidly growing human population that would cause temperatures at recording stations to be falsely elevated when they were too near high population areas.  But the urban heat island correction to such a problem requires that an increasing temperature correction be subtracted from the record, not added to it.

So what is the reason for this positive addition to the surface temperature record?  Well, there is reason to believe it is simply to eliminate the cooling that broadly occurred between 1940 and 1980 when the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was increasing.  This was not good for the claim that man's use of fossil fuels was causing a catastrophic rise in surface temperatures, just as the present failure of the temperature to rise in the last 17 years is also an embarrassment to that hypothesis. 

Steven Goddard produces an e-mail from Tom Wigley to Phil Jones that points to a non-scientific reason for the adjustment reminiscent of a high school student fudging results in a laboratory report to get the expected answer from a botched experiment.

So why is this important?  For one thing, Tom Wigley was a member of the UCAR team.  This outfit describes itself on its website today as:

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research is a consortium of more than 100 member colleges and universities focused on research and training in the atmospheric and related Earth system sciences. Our members set directions and priorities for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which UCAR manages with sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. Through our community programs, UCAR provides innovative services in support of the community's education and research goals.

Phil Jones was the head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK, before his shenanigans revealed by ClimateGate cost him his job.  Phil Jones was a principal coordinator of the science that was incorporated into the first four IPCC reports backing the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming.  So, Tom Wigley of the UCAR climate research coordinating group for all government-funded climate research in the US was scheming with the head of the very important Climatic Research Unit in the UK to fraudulently produce more evidence for their pet theory, as they were being encouraged to do by their governments.  UCAR was and is essentially a propaganda unit charged with also keeping government-funded researchers in-line by setting "directions and priorities" in collusion with the National Science Foundation.

There is almost nothing in the government-managed record of temperatures that one can believe in any more.  The record is highly fudged and the fudgers have no idea themselves what string of changes they made to the data, whether as to how often, how much, or why.  But, those changes appear to systematically be motivated by attempts to prove the hypothesis that man's use of fossil fuels was somehow causing a catastrophic global warming.