did you hear the one about...

NASA screwing up temperatures by mixing up data from one month to another?

Hilarious!

Here are some excerpts from a report from James Taylor in Environment & Climate News...

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies—known as GISS—was forced to admit it committed an egregious error when it publicly claimed October 2008 was the warmest October in history.

It turns out October 2008 was nowhere near a record. Global temperature measurements of the Earth’s lower atmosphere by NASA satellite instruments show it was fairly typical compared to temperatures over the past 30 years and significantly cooler than average temperatures over the past seven years....

Many climate scientists have criticized GISS in recent years for routinely claiming significantly higher global temperatures than those reported by other scientists; for employing a staff that appears to see its role more as advocates than as scientists; for getting caught claiming recent years were warmer than the data indicated; and for failing to provide transparency in how they manipulate raw temperature data before presenting their adjusted “official” temperature reports.

After GISS generated substantial media attention with its claim 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.

Assuming the error was innocent, scientists wondered why GISS hadn’t double-checked its data when it published an October global temperature chart that appeared quite ordinary except for an astonishing warm-temperature anomaly over Russia....

GISS’s overstatement of October warmth was reminiscent of another GISS scandal.

In late 2007 McIntyre discovered GISS had been systematically reporting overly warm U.S. temperatures. McIntyre caused a sensation in late 2007 when he proved NASA had been unjustifiably adding a significant 0.l5º Celsius to its U.S. temperature reports since the year 2000.

As a result of McIntyre’s research, scientists discovered 2006 was not the warmest year in U.S. history, as GISS had very publicly claimed. In fact, 1934 was the warmest year, and 2006 fell to a distant fourth. Only four of the top 11 warmest years have occurred since 1954, according to the corrected data....