The NASA emails are interesting, but I haven't noticed anything too scandalous, apart perhaps from this. After the initial furore over the discovery of the error in their temperature data, NASA bigwig James Hansen decides the correct response is to show that the impact of the correction is small. Unfortunately Makiko Sato, the scientist who maintains the temperature data tells him there's a problem:
On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 11:59 -0500, James Hansen wrote:Makiko, Reto,
r am being beseiged by these (see below), The appropriate response is to show the curves for U.S. and global temperatures before and after (before and after McIntyre's correction). Makiko doubts that this is possible because the earlier result has been "thrown away", We will never live this down if we give such a statement. It must be possible to reconstruct the "before" result. Unfortunately, this needs to be done soon, as there are various writers with deadlines this afternoon. I hope that is possible -- this should have a higher priority that the
calculation that we mentioned yesterday.Jim
By the way, I think that we should save the results of the analyses at least once per year, so we will have a record of how they change.
Oh goodness, not NASA too, I hear you cry. Surely they haven't been ditching data just like their colleagues at CRU? And it's all very well saying that results should be saved "at least once a year", but that's not much good after the bird has flown the coop.
Fortunately, Reto has better news...
From: Reto Ruedy
To: James Hansen
Cc: Makiko Sato, Reto Ruedy
Subject: Re: Fwd: FW: GISS - Truth driven vs agenda driven
Date: Frt 10 Aug 2007 13:09:56 -0400Jim,
Nothing was thrown out ~ I made the corresponding graphs.
Reto
Well that's a relief, but one can't help but wonder if they actually found their earlier results, or if they managed to reconstruct them from scratch.