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On Nov. 10, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies announced that October 2008 was the hottest month ever recorded. Predictably, this raised new fears that global warming was accelerating. The figures provided by GISS are one of the four data sets used in the United Nations' reports on global warming, and are among the most widely quoted. This seemed odd, since record snow falls and cold had been reported around the world. In the U.S., it was, in fact, the 70th warmest October of the last 114 years. It turned out that some of the numbers used by GISS were wrong and a retraction was necessary. Specifically, they had rolled over temperatures from the previous two months in Russia, making it look like Russia had an abnormally hot October.
An error of this type from NASA is inexcusable. The head of GISS is James Hansen, a leading NASA scientist and a proponent of global warming for more than 20 years. A vocal Democrat, he has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from left-wing organizations such as the George Soros' Open Society Institute. A January 2006 New York Times article discusses how his 2005 data showed it was the warmest year in at least a century (that turned out to be incorrect) and his claim that carbon emissions needed to be drastically cut to avoid disaster. In a July 2006 article he wrote in the New York Times, he talks of sea levels rising eighty feet, and he attacks "fringe" contrarians as being funded by fossil fuel industries. Ironically, while he calls the contrarians to be silenced, in the January article he complained of being censored. In the media he is almost always treated as an objective and respected climatologist, despite his bias. Though his work is cloaked in objectivity, he has too much at stake to be proven wrong and long ago made up his mind that climate change is a man-made phenomenon.
Ultimately, that is the problem with issues such as global warming. Once a massive financial and political stake has been established, contrarian research becomes increasingly difficult. There is so much data and so many variables that scientists almost always have to make some judgment calls. When that judgment call is the difference between getting a research grant and being labeled a reactionary, it is easy to see why corners are cut and data is cherry-picked.
Scientists' looking out for their self-interest is human nature. This is even more of a reason for the scientific community to be honest about their bias. Especially in areas with lots of conflicting research and ignorance, or in areas in which heavy financial incentives are present. There is no better example than global warming, in which an entire industry does better the more alarming the data is. It is no surprise that data is being skewed in order to keep global warming fears heightened for maximum financial advantage. The lack of publicity about these errors and the lack of honesty about the bias of many scientists in the field is shameful.
Jack Millman is a junior in political science and economics. He can be reached at millman.5@osu.edu.
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