XDA

Claus von Stauffenberg (played here by Tom Cruise) failed to blow up Hitler, at least twice. I'm not sure that makes for such a heroic premise. Would this have been better in German (assuming Cruise could actually speak German)? That's a tough call. I'm pretty sure the movie sucks, but I'm going anyway. Even a flawed, Hollywood representation of history is sometimes worth watching.

As you can see, all four have a general congruence with the main differences a matter of amplitude, how hot or cold the highs and lows of the graph get; but certainly a consensus trend can be detected even if the absolute data points are different. And that trend for all is down for the period shown. However, at the right side of the graph, after a steep dive of all four in 2007, the ground based two go up a lot while the satellite based two go down a lot. Who's right? [Hint: it's not the ground based].

The unraveling of the GISS scientific fraud started on Monday last when their scientists announced that October 2008 was the hottest on record. What? This past month there were a lot of record colds and early snowfalls around the planet; the Arctic sea ice recovered at the fastest rate ever measured. How could it be the hottest October ever? Anthropogenic global warming deniers Anthony Watt and Steve McIntyre were on the case. Earlier McIntyre had helped demolish the fraudulent Mann "hocky stick" temperature graph the formula for which, he discovered, produced the same results no matter what numbers were fed into it. In a similar vein, both men had found mistakes in GISS and had made Dr. Hansen admit, grudgingly, that despite his claims that the 1990s was the warmest decade ever, it was actually the 1930s, but just barely. That's a blow to a scientist's credibility. Watt has an animated chart of a GISS temperature history rewrite. GISS can't be right now--the current temperature does not change what the temperature was in the past. More to come.

First, GISS spokesmen stood firm. Then it was revealed that rather than use purely October temperature readings, GISS had merely repeated September numbers. Oops, a hit, a palpable hit. Then the worst. GISS spokesman said that because the GISS haa limited resources, it cannot vouch for the accuracy of the data it receives from foreign sources, so don't blame us, you nitpickers.

Wait, it is the duty of a scientific outfit to verify the data it uses in its published analysis. This is a central requirement of any scientific endeavor, but especially important when the analysis is being relied upon by the leaders of nations around the world to form policy--like taxing CO2 production.

Watt was interested in what effect paint, versus whitewash, on the wooden, louvered boxes, had on the measurement of temperature within. He visited some weather station sites to see and discovered most stations do not follow the established siting protocols and thus the increase in temperature they have recorded is largely just a measurement of heat island effect. Many are unreliable for other reasons. Don't get me wrong, if because of concrete and steel and glass, it's 5 degrees hotter downtown than it is in a farmer's field 30 miles away, at both places there are valid temperature readings. But if the urban area is just 5% of the state, then having 50% of the weather stations in urban sites (merely for convenience) will skew the records to hotter than it really is. That's what appears to be going on, basically, with the ground based measurers.

It's actually worse for GISS, and like Fredo to Michael, GISS is dead to me and is not to be taken seriously and will remain so until the employees there openly and publicly clean up their act and become rigorous scientists, rather than cheerleaders/high priests for the new religion of the church of anthropogenic global warming. My prediction is that it will never happen. The first thing that would have to happen is that Hansen would need to be fired.

Here is the reason, I believe, GISS pushes to report higher temperatures than really exist, 20 years ago, in front of the US Congress, Hansen predicted it would get a lot hotter. His team is trying to make their boss appear precient and wise.

Here's how the prediction is actually panning out--not so good.

UPDATE: This is based on a 1933 Nazi poster about the movie SA Mann Brand, which I recognize, so the Godwin rule has been semi-violated. There is a definite Soviet whiff to this as well.