World still buried under inches of global warming hype ... but the rapid meltdown continues [updated]

Record-breaking snow storms in Tibet, Arctic sea ice thirty percent more extensive than last year, "unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures" all the way "from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand," and "in the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years."

So how come NASA's James Hansen -- world's senior warmist and adviser to the good and the great (and Al Gore) -- the chap who told the US Senate that oil company executives need to be locked up for "crimes to humanity"-- the man who last year likened the construction of a new coal-based power plant as equivalent to the holocaust -- who said that trains bringing coal to a new power plants are like the "death trains" moving Jews to extermination camps -- how come he announced last month, October, to be the hottest October on record? 

Simple really. First, Hansen is clearly no stranger to hyperbole, or to "sexing up" his data.  And second, in their apparent eagerness to back up their boss's sexing up, Hansen's Goddard Institute, one of the world's Big Four climate agencies has stuffed up.  Christopher Brooker explains:

    So what explained the anomaly? The Goddard Institute's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
    The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.
    A Goddard Institute spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

The quality control question has been raised before,  suggesting that NASA seems to have "lost track of a number of large cold regions" - not least of them Siberia -- and what's left looks like "a network of contaminated data collection."

And it's on the basis of such "science" as this that we're about to crucify ourselves on the cross of carbon taxes, Emissions Trading Scams and assorted other impositions on production, on industry and on agriculture -- in Brooker's words,  "to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist." 

As he says, it's a question which should give us all pause for thought.

UPDATE:   From the 'but the ACT-Party-are-our-friends file' comes the following email newletter from accountant Mark Hubbard, which is sent to all his rural clients popinting out that ACT, a party of climate change sceptics, campaigned on a policy to abolish the Emissions Tax Scam altogether -- and once joined in the campaign against Labour's Fart Tax -- and now they're saying they'll sign up to a Fart Tax from National!

    My opinion: traitorous, lying, rotten sods. The first thing a NACT Government does is NACT'ker the economy. I can't believe that the first thing Hide does in power, is advocate for yet another tax, and the fart tax!! ACT said nothing about wanting a carbon tax through the election. They made it seem like they were your friend in wanting to get rid of an ETS.
    Unbelievable. It took exactly one week and two days for this government to turn traitor and stab you all in the back. And I know many of you were single issue voting for ACT on this issue.

Read it all here.