Bob Unruh breathlessly writes in a Jan. 27 WorldNetDaily article:
An independent data analyst whose work has been published by Principia Scientific, where scientists deliberate and debate, throwing out predetermined political results in favor of the truth in the data, says the global warming activists are at it again.
They’re manipulating the data.
In this case, lowering the historical temperatures for years prior to 2000. Which makes the temperatures after that look like they’ve risen. Which makes it look like global warming.“A newly uncovered and monumental calculating error in official U.S. government climate data shows beyond doubt that climate scientists unjustifiably added a whopping one degree of phantom warming to the official ‘raw’ temperature record,” the report says.
It comes from the discovery by independent data analyst Steven Goddard, who did a study of the official U.S. temperature records used by NASA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and others.
Because Unruh cares about reporting only one side of the story, he repeats several misleading claims and falsehoods.
Unruh is simply repeating boilerplate Principia Scientific propaganda designed to obscure the fact that it’s a site for global warming skeptics, which means there is, in fact, a predetermined result to the research it publishes. Principia Scientific’s first chairman was noted denier Tim Ball.
Further, Steven Goddard is not only not an “independent data analyst,” that’s not even his real name. DeSmog Blog notes that Goddard is a pseudonym, and that he’s best known for botching data to claim that Arctic Sea ice is not receding when, in fact, the opposite was true.
So we have an anonymous writer known for shoddy research making a claim at a biased website. Funny how Unruh couldn’t be bothered to report those facts to his readers.
Unruh also touts how “well-known scientist Art Robinson” (a buddy of WND managing editor David Kupelian) has “gathered the signatures of 31,487 scientists who agree that there is ‘no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.'” As we’ve previously noted, few of these scientists have any formal training in climate science, so their views are essentially meaningless to the overall debate over climate change.