Dr. Robert Novak on the Lack of Global Warming

Max Sawicky is having some fun at the expense of George Will and Robert Novak. Novak writes:

James E. Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been telling the world that story for many years … Roy Spencer, a research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville who disagrees with Hansen’s science, recently wrote: “Hansen is a smart, productive public servant that is on a crusade for what he believes in.”

If Novak thinks Spencer is the leading authority on the global warming issue, may I suggest he reads Ker Than:

For years, skeptics of global warming have used satellite and weather balloon data to argue that climate models were wrong and that global warming isn’t really happening. Now, according to three new studies published in the journal Science, it turns out those conclusions based on satellite and weather balloon data were based on faulty analyses. The atmosphere is indeed warming, not cooling as the data previously showed … According to Santer, the only group to previously analyze satellite data on the troposphere – the lowest layer in Earth’s atmosphere – was a research team headed by Roy Spencer from University of Alabama in 1992. “This was used by some critics to say ‘We don’t believe in climate models, they’re wrong,'” Santer told LiveScience. “Other people used the disconnect between what the satellites told and what surface thermometers told us to argue that the surface data were wrong and that earth wasn’t really warming because satellites were much more accurate.” The Alabama researchers introduced a correction factor to account for drifting in the satellites used to sample Earth’s daily temperature cycles. But in another Science paper published today, Carl Mears and Rank Wentz, scientists at the California-based Remote Sensing Systems, examined the same data and identified an error in Spencer’s analysis technique. After correcting for the mistake, the researchers obtained fundamentally different results: whereas Spencer’s analysis showed a cooling of the Earth’s troposphere, the new analysis revealed a warming. Using the analysis from Mears and Wentz, Santer showed that the new data was consistent with climate models and theories. “When people come up with extraordinary claims – like the troposphere is cooling – then you demand extraordinary proof,” Santer said. “What’s happening now is that people around the world are subjecting these data sets to the scrutiny they need.”