Survey scientists and you'll discover that there is no debate about global warming or how humans are affecting this process -- the only questions are how quickly it's occurring, what the effects will be and the most effective ways to counteract it. On Friday, many media outlets ran a story about three new scientific papers that undercut one of the remaining Alamos for those who want to dispute the obvious -- that's the argument that the atmosphere had cooled in the tropics and not warmed in the troposphere. In short, the papers in the online journal of "Science" show that the scientists making this claim had made a simple mathematical error and that other measurements were faulty for various reasons. But what a difference a newspaper makes.
The New York Times presents the issue a tad confusingly on page 12. It also quotes the scientists who developed the original troposphere temperature records -- John R. Christy and Roy W. Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville -- who concede mistakes but insist even revised calculations produced a warming rate that was no big deal.
But read USA Today's story on page 3 and you get a much clearer description of the mistakes.
[Researchers] found that the satellites had drifted in orbit, throwing off the timing of temperature measures. Essentially, the satellites were increasingly reporting nighttime temperatures as daytime ones, leading to a false cooling trend. The team also found a math error in the calculations.That's pretty darn clear. How did the NYT describe it? "The satellites' orbits shift and sink over time, their instruments are affected by sunlight and darkness, and data from a succession of satellites has to be calibrated to account for eccentricities of sensitive instruments."
Also, USA Today also went to the front group funded by the big oil companies for a quote:
Mark Herlong of the George C. Marshall Institute declined to comment. The group, financed by the petroleum industry, has used the data disparities to dispute the views of global-warming activists. In recent years, however, the institute has softened its public statements, acknowledging that the planet is indeed getting warmer but still maintaining that the change is happening so slowly that the impact is minimal.But what neither story tells you is that the original authors of the study (quoted by the NYT as sticking to their guns) are apparently funded at least in part by that very same front group. The day before those stories ran, the George C. Marshall Institute posted a release pooh-poohing the new studies and referring to the work by the Alabama researchers as "our (University of Alabama in Huntsville "UAH") satellite estimate for global lower tropospheric ("LT") temperature trends since 1979."
In other words, one of the few minor islands of dissent is finally analyzed by others and found to have simple math errors, not to mention the rather obvious problem of taking temperatures at night rather than day and not acknowledging that disparity (gee, think you'd get lower temperatures at night?) and it's all apparently funded by the oil industry.
Why didn't the New York Times ask the researchers it quoted who funded their work? (Which, of course, I may be wrong about, though referring to it as "our" research seems a tad odd otherwise.) Why isn't that always question number one, especially when a study goes against the tide of what the vast majority of scientists are discovering?
