In 1999, Hansen was unhappy that the US didn’t show any warming.
Whither U.S. Climate?
By James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Jay Glascoe and Makiko Sato — August 1999
What’s happening to our climate? Was the heat wave and drought in the Eastern United States in 1999 a sign of global warming?
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. And 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.
How can the absence of clear climate change in the United States be reconciled with continued reports of record global temperature? Part of the “answer” is that U.S. climate has been following a different course than global climate, at least so far. Figure 1 compares the temperature history in the U.S. and the world for the past 120 years. The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934. Global temperature, in contrast, had passed 1930s values by 1980 and the world has warmed at a remarkable rate over the last 25 years.
So they fixed it during the the next year.
But they were quite clever how they did it. Going from USHCN V1 to V2 they shifted all of the older temperatures downwards, as seen in this animation. This created a non-existent upwards spike, and brought US temperature trends in line with Hansen’s theory.
The green arrow below shows the 0.5C upwards shift in the five year mean anomaly line, made between the 1999 version (red) and the current version in blue.
Closer analysis reveals that it is a hockey stick of exponential data tampering since 1940. Remember that they shifted the baseline temperatures downwards, so the absolute anomaly numbers don’t mean anything. What is important is the magnitude and shape of the curve.
This data tampering brought the US in line with the rest of the world, and secured billions in global warming research funding. The current GISS US temperature graph has a nice hockey stick in it, courtesy of massive tampering by NOAA/NASA.
This next graph shows the raw data (blue) and the NCDC published data in red. It shows how they cool the past in their published graphs, and create the appearance of warming – which is not indicated by the thermometer data.
