Recently, USA Today ran a story about Michael Mann, the lead author of the debunked “Hockey Stick” fable and principal actor in ClimateGate. Specifically, the paper bemoans the inevitable slowing of Mann’s ultra-important, (even “stimulus”-funded) research due to McCarthyites like us skeptics who refuse to just accept an economically harmful ideological agenda ostensibly grounded in what has turned out to be the biggest scientific scandal of our time.

This strange assist in the ongoing effort to rehabilitate the warmmongers offers a nice opportunity to mention an email I just found going through a massive document dump from NASA under the Freedom of Information Act. These 1,500 pages were apparently produced at the 11th hour seeking to forestall litigation we had signaled was coming for NASA’s refusal to come into compliance with the transparency statute.

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We’re still suing for their refusal to turn over entire categories of information for which the taxpayer paid, and which are highly relevant to the unfolding scandals, which withholding was not changed by these documents. We just have to go over the documents first.

And among the gems we found was an admission that NASA (specifically, its Goddard Institute for Space Studies, or GISS and its GISTEMP data) passes no one’s test for credibility. Rather, according to NASA, it’s worse than the “CRU” temperature data that was the central issue in ClimateGate. That is the temperature record which we now know was for all intents and purposes fabricated.

This relative weakness is, again, according to NASA. In an email to USA Today’s weather editor, Doyle Rice. Pre-ClimateGate, to be sure. But read the email yourself and wonder how this never made it into the paper, then, now, or any time in-between.


GISS says CRU Better0001 –

Compounding this admission is that Mr. ClimateGate himself, the UK Climatic Research Center’s(CRU) Phil Jones, even said the same thing to his buddies. Defending what has proved to be at best data he knew he didn’t actually have and, worse, pure fabrication, he wrote that while they may think his data set — so bad that it could not be made sense of despite desperate efforts at backfilling and imposing the by-now infamous “fudge factors” (their words) — boy you oughta get a load of NASA. It’s worse than CRU. Really. “GISS is inferior.”

And now I have NASA’s own GISS agreeing.  And USA Today has had it all along.

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NASA’s temperature data is so woeful that GISS’s Reto Ruedy tells the USA Today weather editor in this email that “My recommendation to you is to continue using…Phil Jones’ data for the global mean [temperatures].” You see, “what we do is accurate enough” — left unspoken: for government work — “But we have no intention to compete with either of the other two organizations in what they do best.”

Yikes. Yes, he said that. NASA’s is worse than the ClimateGate temperature data. According to NASA.

Apparently, and although this was never stressed before in all of the hysterical media that they get for proclaiming to have discerned temperature record after hottest year after exhibit of proof of catastrophic man-made global warming,

NASA’s GISS is really just “basically a modeling group forced into rudimentary analysis of global observed data” back in the day but, “Now we happily combine [the National Climatic Data Center's, or NCDC's] and Hadley Center’s data to get what we need” for purposes of evaluating their models.

NASA’s reference to NCDC invokes the third of four data sets pointed to by our apologist friends who claimed that, well, there really was nothing to see here about that whole CRU thing, because of all that other independent data. Except that here we read that NASA’s data is not independent at all, but thoroughly dependent upon the non-existent/phonied-up CRU numbers, slapped together with what GISS’s Reto Ruedy refers his inquiring (ok, fairly credulous) reporter to as the gold standard for US temperatures, NCDC.

Except that  Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts have exposed in detail how NCDC’s data is garbage, having made a practice out of backing out more rural and higher altitude — that is, cooler — temperature stations over time, exaggerating the warming illusion. Not that you would know this from reading USA Today.

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Three out of three temperature data sets stink to high heaven. And we even have corroboration. From the alarmists, the data custodians and promoters, themselves. Second-sourced, no less.

USA Today did not follow this thread when offered in 2007, or at any time since, including as what was an enormous scandal (outside of the US establishment press) unfolded.

Nice work.