Writing in his Real Science blog, Steven Goddard explained how he found out that NASA had altered U.S. temperature readings to show a warming trend where none existed: He compared graphs published on NASA’s website in 1999 to those available today. He even set up an animation of the two temperature graphs to show the extent of the fraud.

Goddard went further by exhuming quotes from climate changers who also have changed their opinions, including the infamous James Hansen. In 2003 Hansen authored a paper for the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change entitled “Can We Defuse the Global Warming Time Bomb?” in which he concluded that “halting global warming requires urgent, unprecedented international cooperation” with the clear implication that the United Nations was just the group to accomplish it. But back in 1999, Goddard discovered that Hansen co-authored an article at NASA’s Goddard (no relation to Steven) Institute for Space Studies, “Whither U.S. Climate?” in which they claimed:

Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought when the Mississippi almost dried up.... 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s “Dust Bowl” that caused an exodus from the prairies as chronicled in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

Hansen et al. added:

The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming trend hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934....

In the U.S. there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years ... in fact, there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country.

This reflected a study done in 1988 by the British Meteorological Office that concluded that the record set in 1988 “appeared to have been linked, at least in part, to natural fluctuations.” On top of that, scientists from the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) studied temperatures over the past 100 years leading up to the record year (1988) and concluded that “there had been no significant change in average temperatures over that period.”

Steven Goddard noted that apparently the EPA didn’t get the memo about the necessary change in graphology to promote the global warming myth, and consequently still shows on its website that temperatures have fluctuated precious little since the Dust Bowl.

Climate-change skeptic Christopher Booker, the author of the best-seller The Real Global Warming Disaster, saw this as vindication for all the flak he caught after the book was published in 2009. In that book he questioned whether there really was a “consensus” among scientists for AGW (anthropogenic global warming) after all. He went further to predict that once the whistle was blown on the global-warming canard, measures taken by governments to meet the so-called crisis “will turn out to be one of the most expensive, destructive and foolish mistakes the human race has ever made.”

Writing in The Telegraph, Booker examined Goddard’s claims, and expanded on them:

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data.

In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.

Someone else didn’t get the memo, either, about the need to adjust the numbers to fit the narrative: former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Paulson is the fellow who made himself rich while heading up Goldman Sachs. When he left Goldman to take on his stint at Treasury, he sold all of his stock but was allowed to skip paying any capital gains on his profits, saving approximately $250 million in taxes. Now the head of his own climate-change disaster control center, the Paulson Institute, he has an opinion that still reflects the now-newly discredited data, which he expressed in a letter on Saturday to the New York Times:

We’re staring down a climate bubble that poses enormous risks to both our environment and economy. The warning signs are clear and growing more urgent as the risks go unchecked....

The carbon dioxide we’re sending into the atmosphere remains there for centuries, heating up the planet.

It’s necessary to ignore well-informed protests from the climate-change naysayers such as Booker and Goddard, says Paulson:

There is virtually no debate among scientists that the planet is warming and that the burning of fossil fuels is largely responsible....

Those who claim the science is unsettled or action is too costly are simply trying to ignore the problem ... waiting for more information before acting is actually taking a very radical risk.

And what is Paulson recommending, the same man who amplified and extended the Great Recession through massive government interventions rather than letting the free market adjust itself to the previous government-induced distortions? Doctor Fixit has the answer: "We can [solve] this by putting a price on emissions of carbon dioxide — a carbon tax."

It’s tempting to make light of efforts by climate-changers to manipulate the numbers to fit their own agenda. Indeed, the revelations by Steven Goddard make it easy to do so. But the larger climate-change narrative is the drive for more government control over the economy and, if successful, the economies of every country on the planet. In the brave new world they are planning, the air will be pristine but freedom will have vanished in the process.

Image: NASA 2013 temperature anomaly data from nasa.gov

A graduate of Cornell University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .