NASA's Rubber Ruler: An Update

The NASA/GISS temperature record is not actually a record of recorded temperatures. It is simply the most recent version of NASA's adjustments to older adjustments. It is not thermometer readings. It is models all the way down.

In 2012, I wrote an American Thinker article on the status of global warming at the time. I used the latest available NASA/GISS data to do that analysis, which was the version NASA had on its website on April 30, 2012 (Land-Ocean Temperature Index [LOTI]).

At that time, the data from 1880 through 2011 showed a warming trend of 0.59 degrees Celsius per century.

What is that warming trend using the latest data from NASA's website (December 30, 2017), using those same exact years (1880-2011)? The answer is 0.66˚ C.

How did warming accelerate if we are looking at the very same years?

Apparently, the Earth is getting warmer faster than it was five and a half years ago, but not because of actual recorded thermometer readings in those last five and a half years. It is getting warmer faster because NASA adjusted the data to show faster warming.

When you go to the NASA website, you can download temperature anomalies "1880-present." But those data change every month. NASA adjusts it. You cannot find any older versions. NASA makes available only its most recent version. And NASA does not explain how it adjusts the data. You must simply trust it.

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We need to answer four questions before we take real action to address man-caused, catastrophic global warming:

Is the globe getting warmer?

If so, is man doing it (or most of it)?

If so, is it bad?

If so, is the massive-reductions-in-CO2 approach the best way to deal with it?

The temperature record does not even address the last three of these questions. Yet even that first, most basic, question is on shaky ground. One could say that warming is man-caused: men adjusted the temperature record.

I know that NASA adjusted the temperature record in a way that accelerated the warming trend. What I don't know for sure is how much of the warming trend is due solely to such adjustments. One peer-reviewed study says "nearly all" of the warming is fabricated.

I would sure like to look at the science of global warming. But without physical observations one can trust, how does one do that? It is all one big "trust us." But that is not science. The "temperature record" is not a record of thermometer readings. It is a summary of what government-funded people with science degrees think is OK for us to see.