The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time is the fraud by which government functionaries alter data collected and previously reported in official data bases in order to support a narrative of impending catastrophic global warming. No other scientific fraud in world history comes close to this one in scope or significance.

The prior 31 posts in this series have all concerned alteration of one particular sort of data, namely temperature records.

But why should we really care that the earth’s atmosphere is getting a little warmer? The UN has supposedly set some kind of Maginot Line at a 1.5 deg C temperature increase from 20th century levels — an amount so small that you can barely feel it when it occurs each day. The 1.5 deg mark is just not that all that scary. So the bureaucrats need a Plan B to scare the bejeezus out of the people. Plan B is sea level rise.

So don’t be surprised to learn that the sea level data, produced by NASA, have recently been altered — and of course, in a way to enhance the global warming scare narrative.

It’s been almost two years (February 20, 2022) since I added a post to this series. The reason is that global surface temperatures, as measured by NOAA and NASA, had decreased somewhat from 2020 highs, bringing about a hiatus in the otherwise endless drumbeat of propaganda from those agencies claiming “hottest month ever” or “hottest year ever.”

But then a strong El Niño early last year induced a small temperature increase several months later, picked up by the NOAA/NASA thermometer network. Result: From NOAA, October 16, 2023 (“Globally, September 2023 was the warmest September in the 174-year NOAA record. The year-to-date (January–September) global surface temperature ranked as the warmest such period on record.”); NOAA, November 15 (“The planet added another record-breaking month to 2023, with October ranking as the warmest October in the 174-year global climate record.”); Axios, December 14 (“With November ranking as the warmest such month on record, NOAA is projecting greater than 99.5% odds that this year will be the world's warmest since instrument records began in the 19th century.”). Expect the official announcement that 2023 was the “hottest year ever” to come out some time around the middle of this month.

But do the data really establish that the most recent months and year are the hottest?

Friday’s post principally reported on the recent (February 8, 2022) article by O’Neill, et al., in Atmospheres, “Evaluation of the Homogenization Adjustments Applied to European Temperature Records in the Global Historical Climatology Network Dataset.”

In the piece, O’Neill, et al., dramatically demonstrate that the NOAA/NCEI “homogenization” algorithm is wildly off the mark in its intended mission of identifying and correcting for supposed “discontinuities” or “breakpoints” in weather station location or instrumentation in order to provide a more accurate world temperature history.

At the same time, although not mentioned in O’Neill, et al., the NOAA/NCEI algorithm is wildly successful in generating a world temperature history time series in the iconic hockey stick form to support the desired narrative of climate alarm.

What should be done?

This is the 29th post in a series going all the way back to July 2013.

For newer readers, what I refer to as “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time” is the systematic alteration of world temperature history records to create and/or augment a warming trend, and thereby support a political narrative that the world’s energy economy needs to be completely transformed by government command in order to avoid catastrophic human-caused climate change.

A U.S. government agency called the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI, in turn a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is part of the Department of Commerce) is the most important source for world historical temperature information. NCEI collects data monthly from a network of several thousand ground-based weather stations both in the U.S. and around the world, and reports the results in various “global time series” going back to 1880.

When graphed, the NCEI data show the classic “hockey stick” formation, with rapid, and seemingly alarming, temperature increases in recent years.

But the NCEI data as presented have been subject to extensive massaging, referred to as “homogenization,” before being finalized and presented to the public as the alarming hockey stick.

Curious citizens, seeing the governmental threatening the reliability and cost of the energy system, might reasonably ask, what is the level of accuracy of the temperature presentation, and how much of the presented temperature increase is real versus an artifact of adjustments made by bureaucrats with a vested interest in getting the “right” outcome?

What I refer to as the “Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time” is the systematic alteration of historical world temperatures to make it appear, falsely, that the most recent months and years are the “warmest ever.” The basic technique of the fraud is the artificial lowering of previously-reported data as to world temperatures in earlier years, in order to erase earlier warmth and amplify the apparent warming trend. This is the 28th post in this series. The previous post in the series appeared on October 5, 2020. To view all 27 prior posts, you can go to this composite link.

The deliverable products of the temperature fraudsters are purported charts of world temperatures derived from a thermometer-based surface record (called GHCN, or Global Historical Climate Network), generally going back to about 1880. The charts are engineered to appear in an iconic “hockey stick” shape, with relatively flat earlier years followed by a sharply rising “blade” in the most recent years.

Every few years the government (this is a joint effort of NASA and NOAA) comes out with a new version of these data. The latest version is called GHCN version 4, which began in 2018.