Thursday
Jan142010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Judicial Watch obtains NASA emails
Jan 14, 2010 Climate This is hot off the presses - Judicial Watch has obtained NASA emails relating to the furore over Steve McIntyre's discovery of an error in their data back in 2007. The revelation of the so-called "Y2K error" lead to a reassessment of climate history in the US, with 1934 being promoted above 20051998 as the hottest year on record.
Judicial Watch article here. The emails are here. Enjoy.
Reader Comments (5)
It's a cracker. 'Only 0.15c difference in US records, well within margin for error'. Oh dear. Quickly, what's the American Climategate going to be called? Total denial written thru the emails.
The correspondence is quite entertaining but not much there that has not already been covered. Steve M will probably feel he has to write some lengthy posts to justify his position but will mainly cover old ground that will be a diversion from matters Climategate. and his still incomplete FOIA inventory
In reality what we have here is
1. The NASA view (probably legit) that Steve M was incorrect with his claim that he was personally being victomised/prevented from data scraping
2. A view of the press interest in the "Y2K" problem that ultimately led NASA to release the "code".
3. Evidence of confusion and confirmation bias in the NASA interpretation of their own error as exposed by some fine detective work by Steve M..
As with the Hadley climategate fiasco, the real news is in the code, not in the emails.
In the NASA climategate fiasco, all we have thus far are emails -- disappointingly little to go on, as the FOIA request seems to have focused on correspondence relating to the question of which year was the hottest.
But there is this one little gem:
[excerpted]
09 Aug 2007
Reto Ruedy to James Hansen
“Steve [McIntyre] will keep asking me for our “software” and I’m tempted to ignore those requests, since our description of what we do with the data completely describes our procedures.”
Now that KUSI TV http://www.kusi.com/ has revealed that the NASA dataset pointedly and progressively excludes temperature data from colder locations (automatically generating a warming trend), it might be that the software Steve is seeking has an interesting station-exclusion algorithm somewhere.
Scientists are generally expected to describe their procedures -- especially public scientists. When they *don't* want to reveal their procedures, either (a) they're nothing to brag about or (b) even worse than that.
We need another FOIA, especially in light of what KUSI TV discovered about NASA's fudging.
Note the inordinate trouble NASA has gone to to provide the emails in the most useless possible form: scanned pictures of printed documents.
This is an old trick; SCO used it a while back in response to IBM discovery requests.
It's easy enough to OCR it though.