Global Warming Update: Russia Causes Climate Change

For a brief few hours, October 2008, was the warmest October on record. Extremely high temperatures recorded in Russia and neighboring states was the cause of the highest October record. Is this a plot by cleaver Russian scientists to extend the Russian growing season? No it is a not so cleaver mistake.

NASA's Godard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) has a product called GISTEMP. It is the agencies Global Mean Surface temperature, one of the premier indicators of global warming during the industrial age. Their product is often criticized by Climate Change skeptics as being overly adjusted and reliant on potentially less than reliable data.

On Monday, November 11^th , GISTEMP posted their October temperature anomaly map with this huge Burgundy blob of color indicating temperature as much a 13.7 degrees centigrade higher than normal in the region of Siberia. Anthony Watts on his blog, What's Up With That, posted the map. Over the next few hours faithful readers of his and another skeptic blog Climate Audit, noticed there was something wrong. It appeared that September temperatures were copied as October temperatures causing a fairly large error. Steve McIntyre, owner of the Climate Audit Blog confirmed the error and notified Anthony Watts and Dr. James Hansen, head of GISS of the problem.

Due the federal holiday, the error was noted on the GISTEMP site stating the corrected data would be posted today. True to their statement revised data was used to post a new October temperature map that shows less elevated temperatures. All is right with the Climate Change world right? 'Fraid not. The new map also has a few errors. Gavin Schmidt, the unofficial spokesman for GISTEMP, (he makes it very clear he has nothing to do with the GISTEMP product, especially the last few days), made this post on Realclimate.org. Quote: Groan... The NOAA fixes are not complete. There are still some stations where they have some Sep data in the Oct column. Stay tuned for more updates... End quote.

There is more to this comment than one might think. After writing a lengthy post on Monday about bloggers making mountains out of molehills, Gavin fielded comments on Realclimate from both mountaineers and molehill kickers explaining the error, how it will be quickly fixed, thanking the many eyes of the blogosphere for finding the error and explaining that he only worked in the same building as the GISTEMP crew. With all the bologosphere eyes focused on the first wrong and the second wrong temperature maps other potential errors and omissions are being bandied about the internet.

This time the eyes have it and it is embarrassing for GISS. Since the main stream media will likely not discuss this on the evening news, follow the story for yourselves at the sites listed below. Brownie points for noting any snarkiness.

Realclimate , What's Upt With That and ClimateAudit