The paper was immediately greeted with suspicion, not least because one of the authors was Michael Mann of the infamous "hockey stick", now discredited, and the data was reconstructed from very sketchy weather station records, combined with assumptions from satellite observations. But Steve McIntyre, who did the most to expose Mann's "hockey stick", now notices a far more embarrassing problem with Steig's paper.
Previous researchers hadn't overlooked the data. What they'd done was to ignore data from four West Antarctic automatic weather stations in particular that didn't meet their quality control. As you can see below, one shows no warming, two show insignificant warming and fourth - from a station dubbed "Harry' shows a sharp jump in temperature that helped Steig and his team discover their warming Antarctic.
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Harry in fact is a problematic site that was buried in snow for years and then re-sited in 2005. But, worse, the data that Steig used in his modelling which he claimed came from Harry was actually old data from another station on the Ross Ice Shelf known as Gill with new data from Harry added to it, producing the abrupt warming. The data is worthless. Or as McIntyre puts it:
"Considered by itself, Gill has a slightly negative trend from 1987 to 2002. The big trend in "New Harry" arises entirely from the impact of splicing the two data sets together. It's a mess."Read this link and this to see McIntyre's superb forensic work.
Why wasn't this error picked up earlier? Perhaps because the researchers got the results they'd hoped for, and no alarm bell went off that made them check. Now, wait for the papers to report the error with the zeal with which they reported Steig's "warming". See Andrew Bolt's post here.
Another black eye for Nature, another perversion of science by Mann and yet another foot-in-mouth embarrasment for George Moonbiot who just today attacked Christopher Booker's attack on Steig, highlighted Antarctic warming and defended Mann's hockey stick. Cognitive dissonance in action.
Comment: Foot in Mouth disease is becoming an epidemic in the Global Warming community.
Another research paper latched onto by the global warming promoters, published in Nature, articles broadcast on NASA's website, PhysOrg, Science Daily, Live Science, Geology.com, all the news agencies, all the online news sites. 1.7 million pages on the Internet with references to the work of Steig and his bad and falsified data.
Does anyone think that all these sites and organizations will now publish this new information? Remember how the global warming promoters work. The hack job by George Monbiot of Christopher Booker mentioned in the above article is a classic example of the pathology in action. If you are not sure how it works, take a look at all the links in the above article. When you read george Mobiot's hack blog, scroll down the page to the comments of 'geoffchambers'.
geoffchambers comment: Global Warming in Action!