Although it has been emerging for seven years or more, one of the most
extraordinary scandals of our time has never hit the headlines. Yet another
little example of it lately caught my eye when, in the wake of those excited
claims that 2014 was “the hottest year on record”, I saw the headline on a
climate blog: “Massive
tampering with temperatures in South America”. The evidence on
Notalotofpeopleknowthat, uncovered by Paul Homewood, was indeed striking.
Puzzled by those “2014 hottest ever” claims, which were led by the most quoted
of all the five official global temperature records – Nasa’s Goddard
Institute for Space Studies (Giss) – Homewood examined a place in the world
where Giss was showing temperatures to have risen faster than almost
anywhere else: a large chunk of South America stretching from Brazil to
Paraguay.
Noting that weather stations there were thin on the ground, he decided to
focus on three rural stations covering a huge area of Paraguay. Giss showed
it as having recorded, between 1950 and 2014, a particularly steep
temperature rise of more than 1.5C: twice the accepted global increase for
the whole of the 20th century.
But when Homewood was then able to check Giss’s figures against the original
data from which they were derived, he found that they had been altered. Far
from the new graph showing any rise, it showed temperatures in fact having
declined over those 65 years by a full degree. When he did the same for the
other two stations, he found the same. In each case, the original data
showed not a rise but a decline.
Homewood had in fact uncovered yet another example of the thousands of pieces
of evidence coming to light in recent years that show that something very
odd has been going on with the temperature data relied on by the world's
scientists. And in particular by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), which has driven the greatest and most costly scare in
history: the belief that the world is in the grip of an unprecedented
warming."
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