In a famous column in 2006 titled "How to identify American totalitarians," author Dennis Prager quoted what he called the old Soviet dissident joke: "In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it’s the past that is always changing."  Prager cited examples of the likes of the ACLU and anti-smoking activists brazenly altering things from the past to support their narratives.  But of course the far more serious totalitarian threat comes when the government makes up facts about the past in its quest to expand its own power and take freedom away from the people.

Now, our own government would never do anything like that, right?  Right??????  If you think that, then you obviously haven't been reading my long-running series titled "The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time," the most recent entry of which (Part IX) appeared in December.  That series has included links to some dozens of articles and blog posts where mostly independent researchers have gone out and compared raw temperature data from hundreds of places around the globe to the current data sets published by our government functionaries at the likes of NASA and NOAA.  And somehow, when these comparisons are made, the results are always the same, over and over again: the government agencies have altered older data to be cooler, thereby introducing into history exaggerated warming trends not present in the raw data.

As just a few examples from the series, in Part IX I linked to descriptions by German journalist Gunter Ederer describing the recent (November 2015) work of Professor Friederich Ewert that included checking raw data of large numbers of randomly-sampled stations against current NASA-GISS data.  In Part III I discussed the work of a guy named Paul Homewood as to massive lowering of old temperatures from Paraguay and other locations.  In Part II I dealt with the extensive work of a blogger named Tony Heller in documenting literally dozens of instances of lowering old temperatures from around the world.  Follow this link to get an idea of the massive extent of this.  Consider this from the description by Ederer of Ewert's 2015 work:

Ewert painstakingly examined and tabulated the reams of archived data from 1153 stations that go back to 1881 – which NASA has publicly available – data that the UN IPCC uses to base its conclusion that man is heating the Earth’s atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels. According to Ederer, what Professor Ewert found is “unbelievable”:

From the publicly available data, Ewert made an unbelievable discovery: Between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered so that they showed a significant warming, especially after 1950. […] A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own datasets so that especially after WWII a clear warming appears – although it never existed.”

Ederer writes that Ewert particularly found alterations at stations in the Arctic. Professor Ewert randomly selected 120 stations from all over the world and compared the 2010 archived data to the 2012 data and found that they had been tampered to produce warming.

(The work of Ederer and Ewert is in German, but the above can be found at NoTricksZone here.)

Now, what could be the purpose of the government altering temperatures of the past substantially downward?  Really, does anybody care what the temperature in Nome, Alaska was in 1910?  Well, there is the fact that EPA has declared to the world in its 2009 "Endangerment Finding" that CO2 from fossil fuels is a danger to humanity because it is warming the planet.  And EPA has used that "Endangerment Finding" as the basis for what it calls its "Clean Power Plan," (CPP) otherwise known as a massive seizure of power unto EPA, a federal takeover of the electric-power generating sector of the economy, as well as an effort to shut down the entire American coal industry from mining through power generation.

In one of the more consequential litigations going on in the country right now, some 27 states, plus numerous utilities that burn coal and numerous coal companies have sued EPA in the DC Circuit seeking invalidation of the CPP.  Early this year those petitioners asked the DC Circuit to stay the CPP pending the result of the litigation, and the DC Circuit refused the stay; but then the petitioners went to the Supreme Court for the stay, and in February they got it.  Now the case is before the DC Circuit for consideration on the merits.  And a couple of days ago there arrives on my desk a copy of EPA's main brief in the case justifying its position that the CPP is a valid exercise of its authority.  The brief is a massive effort at impenetrability, 175 pages of bureaucratic doublespeak.  But as relevant to this post, we find this at page 9:

Climate change is already occurring.  Nineteen of the twenty warmest years on record have all occurred in the past twenty years, and 2015 was the hottest year ever recorded.  Recent scientific assessments have found that climate change is damaging every area of the country.  80 Fed. Reg. at 64,686-88.  These assessments make clear that substantially reducing emissions now is necessary to avoid the worst impacts.

And what is the support for that statement that "2015 was the hottest year ever recorded"?  A footnote gives us these two links: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/videos/2014-global-temperature-recap; https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/no-surprise-2015-sets-new-global-temperature-record.  These are precisely the government press releases based entirely on the altered surface-temperature record discussed above.  And, despite the vast amount of discussion all over the web about the data alterations and the fact that they always go one direction and that the alterations turn a record that does not support the government's narrative of unusual warming into one that seemingly does, this brief simply does not mention the subject of the alterations at all.  The altered record is just presented to the DC Circuit as incontestable fact.  Hey, it comes from the perfect, all-knowing government functionaries!

Also somehow completely omitted from the government's brief is any mention of the satellite and balloon data sets that are inconsistent with and contradict the surface temperature record on which the government relies.  In a post on January 22 titled "It's Easy To Prove Your Hypothesis If You Just Pretend That The Adverse Evidence Does Not Exist," I commented on the very NOAA press release now used by EPA as the support for its position in court:

Everybody who follows this also knows that the ground-based thermometer records have been greatly "adjusted" by the people who publish them, and that all or nearly all of the increase in temperatures in recent years is in the adjustments and not present in the raw data.  So wouldn't you think that NOAA in its release would at the minimum acknowledge the existence of the other contrary data and attempt somehow to deal with the contradictions?  Well, take a look at that release; and, if you will, follow the link through to their full end-of-2015 Report.  You will not find the slightest mention that the satellite or balloon data even exist.  And of course that also means that you will not find any attempt to explain the discrepancies between and among data sets, or to justify why one is better than others.

That post also includes a chart of the satellite and balloon temperature data as presented by John Christy of UAH in his recent Congressional testimony.  The chart shows that the satellite and balloon temperature sets agree closely during the periods for which they co-exist.  Now, the satellite and balloon data sets on the one hand, and the altered surface temperature data set on the other hand, cannot both be right.   The government's presentation only of the one record it prefers, known to be filled with massive alterations all going the direction it needs them to go to support the narrative, without any mention or discussion of discrepancies as against other data sets, is the height of unethical conduct.

On the other hand, this approach maximizes the government's chance for success in a huge seizure of power.  Do they really care about anything else but that?