The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) cult just loves tampering with data and this latest case surprised even me.

They have been very upset over one little inconvenient truth – Even though we’ve been doing exactly what the AGW cult told us NOT to do (pump more CO2 into the atmosphere), temperatures (as measured by satellites) have been flat and there has been no correlation between temperatures and atmospheric CO2 for the past 18 years.

From this NPR story we see that the AGW cult has supposedly solved this mystery and they did it by manipulating the temperature data (shock!).

The AGW cult ‘scientists’ think that the solution to this mystery lies in the way ocean temperature data is obtained and they’ve spun quite a compelling story to those (like NPR) who aren’t interested in digging just below the surface of the claims.

Ocean temperature data used to come exclusively from ships (outlined here) where they’d either pull a bucket of water to the deck and stick a thermometer in it or measure the temperature from a sensor installed on the intake tube where they sucked in water in cool their engines. But starting in the 1980’s buoys with temperature sensors were dropped in the ocean to complement this ship data and this is the premise of the new AGW cult paper that explains the ‘pause’ in global temperatures.

From the NPR story, we see how the lead author describes their discovery:

“Karl and his colleagues decided to look at stretches of water where ships pass very near buoys, in order to compare the two temperatures. And they made a surprising discovery.

“The buoys actually read colder than the ships,” Karl says.

“Even though the two thermometers were in the same place, they gave different readings. And it was happening all over the world. As more buoys were dropped into the sea — all delivering measurements that were consistently cooler than a ship would show in that same spot — the warming trend in the average global temperature seemed to slow dramatically.”

So when confronted with different measurements taken from the same locations, they concluded that the crude measurements used by the ships were far superior to the floating thermometers. Why did they choose the error prone measurements of the ships vs the floating sensors? Easy, it’s because that choice fit their narrative better!

Forget the fact that water entering the warm hull of an engine compartment might add a little heat to the sample. Also forget the variation that is associated with pulling a bucket of water up in ambient air. Let’s just choose these methods over the much more accurate sensors on the buoys.

A high priest of the AGW cult (Kevin Trenberth) then goes to make this absurd statement in the NPR article

“Kevin Trenberth, who wasn’t involved in this analysis, says critics may be skeptical of these revisions, but they shouldn’t be.”

Oh really?!?! I can’t wait to hear this one.

“You see this kind of thing also with the stock market and various other economic indicators: ‘Oh they’ve revised the estimates of what the unemployment rate was in the last quarter,’ or something like that, and that’s exactly what’s going on here,” Trenberth says.”

Mr. Trenberth uses the example of economic revisions that come from employer and household surveys and compares this to tampering with raw, measured temperature data. Astounding.

Mr. Trenberth must fancy himself as Obi Wan Kenobi and the rest of us are just stupid Stormtoopers – “This is not the global temperature pause you are looking for.”

Raw data to an AGW cult ‘scientist’ is nothing more than clay is to a potter and now they think this ‘pause’ mystery is solved.

NPR and countless others will bloviate over this without asking the very simple question as to why the AGW cult treated the highly error prone measurements employed by the ships over the floating buoy method that has far less sources of error.

It’s laughable how far the AGW cult ‘scientists’ have strayed from true science.