The Global Warming Debate: Watts Happening?

For something that is a done deal there sure is a lot of debate in the blogosphere over global warming. Steve McIntyre is working on the newly release codes from NASA. Anthony Watts has published his preliminary data on the state of the US weather stations. James Hansen is providing links to his blog posts on the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) site. Roy Spencer has published an article on cloud impacts on long wave radiation, (which I haven't read because it costs nine bucks to download and I am not going to link to it because that sucks).

Caught up in the moment, I tried to brush up on my FORTRAN 77 programming. The six primary brain cells required for that task seem to be on vacation or were damaged in the mid eighties. In any case, Windows Vista does not play well with free version of FORTRAN I downloaded. So I will leave that task to geekier geeks.

While setting up the code, the crew at Climate Audit noted that several of the data sets have changed a couple of times in the last month. Raw data should not change. To follow calculations one has to have a solid starting point and that is the raw data. There may be a large story to come if indeed the raw data is being manipulated. That just ain't Kosher.

In Excel, I did manage to compare a few weather sites that had combined data. There is a noted flaw in the combination procedure. Using the weather year, December through November produced a first year error due to the previous year December having to be estimated from another source. I was able to verify that error, but the overall significance is not known without a much larger sample to determine if a trend exists.