Senior climate scientist queries temperature data ‘adjustments’

Top climate change scientist Dr Roy Spencer has waded into a growing controversy over whether the public are getting accurate data on global warming.

Since 2009, when climate sceptics in New Zealand discovered “adjustments” had been made to historical temperature records, concern has spread worldwide at similar adjustments found in Australia, the UK and the United States.

Now Spencer, a specialist in satellite temperature records, has checked official land based weather station records in the USA and discovered most of the claimed global warming of the past 40 years appears to be a result of data adjustments after the fact, not raw temperature records.

“And I must admit that those adjustments constituting virtually all of the warming signal in the last 40 years is disconcerting. When “global warming” only shows up after the data are adjusted, one can understand why so many people are suspicious of the adjustments,” he said in a blog post on the problem this week.

The world’s media, and in fact governments around the world, rely on data released by climate change observation agencies to tell them how much the globe is warming up, but with historical temperature records now being adjusted, it casts serious doubt on claims surrounding “the hottest year” or “the hottest month”

In general, historical temperature records from up to a century ago have been artificially adjusted downwards to make them appear colder, while more recent temperatures have been readjusted upwards, thus creating a higher rate of global warming in the records used for official purposes.