Last fall it was widely reported that October 2008 was the warmest October on record. Not so widely reported is the truth, namely that this was shown to be the result of an “error” by James Hanson and Company at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Hanson, who is in charge of the GISS data, is widely known as not only a global warming alarmist but a hard core advocate of extremist policies to reduce atmospheric CO2. According to an article in the latest Environment and Climate News, published by the Heartland Institute:
After GISS generated substantial media attention with its claim that October 2008 was the warmest October in history, a number of global warming ?skeptics? smelled something fishy and examined the data themselves. They soon discovered NASA and its partners at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had copied the September 2008 temperature data from Russia into the October Russian temperature dataset.
As it turns out October was quite typical compared to October temperatures over the last 30 years and was cooler than the average of the last 7 years. The Heartland publication also points out that this is the same Hanson run climate data that had erroneously reported that 2006 was the warmest year on record. After they fixed that “error” it was discovered that, no, 1934 was and that 2006 fell to 4th. In fact once GISS fixed its data it was discovered that only 4 of the warmest 11 years on record have occurred since 1954.
