Steven Goddard, or
whatever his real name is, is the author of
a wordpress blog called Real Science.
I'll pause a moment here to allow that blog title to sink in. Its rich irony, if not already evident, will become clear shortly.
As the DeSmogBlog link above points out, Goddard has
initially tried to deny and then ultimately succumbed to reality before:
"Dr. Walt Meier at NSIDC has convinced me this week that their ice extent numbers are solid... It is clear that the NSIDC graph is correct, and that 2008 Arctic ice is barely 10% above last year – just as NSIDC had stated."
You would figure Goddard learned his lesson, but he didn't. He just changed targets. Now, rather than accusing the
NSIDC of cooking the books, he's trying the
same awful horseshit with NASA and NOAA:
"Over the past 15 years, NASA and NOAA have turned a long term US cooling trend into a warming trend. But it is even worse than that, because almost every year they make the past cooler and the present warmer."
Yup, you got it, folks. If at first you don't succeed, deny, deny again. With other agencies, of course, so you can pretend your previous face-palming failures didn't happen.
"Real science" to Goddard is apparently some strange process that would
not allow over a decade worth of findings to update the data. In his mind, helpful, well-intended, scientific self-correction like that must be due to – drumroll, please – some conspiracy, maybe like the one above that
didn't exist at the NSIDC:
"These alterations are being made by government employees with a strong vested interest in global warming, who should recuse themselves because of their overt conflict of interest. Their boss, the President of the United States, has made it clear that he will not accept any data which does not promote global warming theory. That is pretty strong motivation to generate warming data."
For people like Goddard, tin foil alone doesn't offer enough protection.
He presents no proof of this conspiracy other than the numbers have changed, so therefore there must be something pernicious at work behind the alteration, and he dismisses the reasonable explanation out of hand, because it doesn't fit with his Looney Tunes narrative:
"NOAA does have discussions on obscure web pages describing their thought process behind the alterations, but few people know about this. The alterations are highly subjective, and could just as easily go the other way – making the present cooler due to urban heat island effects."
Updating data and alerting the public you have done so is an "obscure" and "subjective" trick. Oh, brother. In reality, NOAA and NASA are careful to rather explicitly and clearly annotate public release of data sets with update/alteration reminders like
the following:
Because these data are primarily intended for the study of climate variability and change, observations have been adjusted to account for the artificial effects introduced into the climate record by factors such as instrument changes, station relocation, observer practice changes and urbanization. Some of the more current data provided by the Climate at a Glance system are preliminary and may be modified after appropriate quality control has been performed. As a result, some values available on this site differ from the official observations.
In fact, the notifications are
damn well near bloody fucking exhaustive. You'd just have to be a paranoid dipshit of epic proportions to miss and/or dismiss such obvious and honest attempts at full disclosure.
Maybe tin foil hats, or whatever Goddard wears, trap false-positive conspiracy theory frequencies. Dunno, just trying to think of reasons why he'd be so confused. Just trying to help, ya know?
And it's Goddard's opinion that the obligatory denier "urban heat island effect" canard just
just hasn't had its lifeless corpse dragged around enough yet, I guess.
This is the abysmal lack of logic and evidence that
all screwball conspiracy theorists offer. The "government" (NASA and NOAA receive daily propaganda and marching instructions from the Obama administration, which is a de facto den of liars, didn't you know?) is hiding things, because, well, because Goddard says so, that's why.
Oh, and
this infantile "reasoning" as well:
Progressives say there are no government conspiracies, which explains why Edward Snowden rocked the world with his disclosures.
We're dealing with someone who has the intellectual capacity of your average 7 year-old. And my apologies to 7 year-olds who, unlike Goddard, understand why this batshit insane comment is
UTTER BULLSHIT. According to Goddard, because federal agencies like the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, the White House, etc., which all have obvious and stated obligations to secrecy for the sake of national security (whether or not you agree with those imperatives), can and will lie to us from time to time, this means that research and exploration divisions of the government, like NASA, NOAA, GISS, etc., which have little or no strangling commitments to our nation's defense and security, and quite the opposite have
policies of public outreach and disclosure (when budgets allow, of course), will also purposefully seek to deceive us as well. Guilt by lack of significant association, or something
It follows that
NASA must be lying to us about the UFOs, too, I suppose.
Steven Goddard is a vile and ridiculous troll, who wouldn't recognize real science if it drove up on a Mars rover, slapped him across the ignorant face with a stack of updated sea and surface temp print-outs, and knocked the wind out of him by jamming a copy of
The Feynman Lectures on Physics into his gut.
