The failure of temperatures to continue to rise in accordance with alarmist model predictions has left the alarm-promoting guys at NASA and NOAA without fodder for their former annual “hottest year ever!!!” press releases. From the NASA end-of-year-2018 release:

2018 Was the Fourth Warmest Year, Continuing Long Warming Trend. . . . The 2018 global temperature average ranks behind 2016, 2017, and 2015.

I leave it for you to figure out how a year that was down from 2017, which in turn was down from 2016, somehow “continues[es] [a] long warming trend.” In a real “long warming trend,” shouldn’t each year be successively warmer than the previous year?

So what is to be done? Readers of this series will not be surprised to learn that in this period where not so many people are looking, the temperature adjusters have been beavering away in the bowels of their collections of data, continuing to send inconvenient readings of the past down the memory hole, and to “adjust” the temperatures of the past down, and of the present up. Let me provide a small roundup of some things that have been discovered recently.

At NoTricksZone on June 25, Pierre Gosselin posts some work by a Japanese guy named Kirye. Kirye is a Japanese climate skeptic Twitter-blogger, but his Twitter page is in Japanese, so you probably won’t be able to read it. Kirye noticed that NASA came out on June 14 with a new version, version 4, of its surface-thermometer-based temperature series known as GISTEMP. GISTEMP v.4 is now based on the records of the also-newly-adjusted Global Historical Climate Network group of temperature stations, now called GHCN v.4. Kirye then analyzes the new data from NASA at six particular and widely-scattered weather stations: Punta Arenas, Chile; Marquette, Michigan; Port Elizabeth, South Africa; Davis, Antarctica; Hachijojima, Japan; and Valencia, Ireland.

Sure enough, there have been additional adjustments, as always in the same direction — older down, and newer up. But those adjustments between v.3 and v.4 have been relatively minor. More significantly, Kirye discovered a different maneuver which is even more incredible, and which he proves by direct links back to NASA’s own website: In the v.4 graphs that it provides, NASA has relabeled the hugely-adjusted v.3 data as “unadjusted.”

I’ll go in detail through just one of the sites for purposes of illustration. I pick Marquette, Michigan. The NASA graph for v.3 for that site can be found at this link. That graph shows both “unadjusted” and “adjusted” temperatures. The “unadjusted” graph shows a temperature peak in the 1930s followed by a substantial cooling trend since. The v.3 adjusted temperatures closely match the unadjusted in the recent years; but in the early years (1880 even to the 1970s) there are dramatic downward adjustments, averaging over 2 full deg C, thus creating a strong artificial warming trend. Then go to the brand-new NASA v.4 graph for the same site. The series that was labeled as “adjusted” on the v.3 graph has now been relabeled “unadjusted,” as a prelude to some further adjustments (which are less dramatic than the previous ones but still up to 1 deg C).

Kirye provides an animated comparison of the NASA v.3 and v.4 “unadjusted” temperature series. A small cooling trend in the v.3 unadjusted series has been turned into a strong warming trend in what is called v.4 “unadjusted” series (but is actually the v.3 adjusted series).