“Ccooling the past” adjustments have been carried out in the Arctic region and the scale and geographic range of these is breathtaking.
We are told that the biggest sign of “climate change” is the rapidly warming Arctic, even called the World’s thermometer, proof that global warming cannot have stopped.
Certainly, the evidence of this from GISS is persuasive.
Yet it is well established that the Arctic warmed up rapidly during the 1930’s and 40’s, before temperatures plunged in the 1960’s and 70’s. James Hansen, himself, recognised this, as the graph below from his 1987 paper Global Trends of Measured Surface Air Temperature , showed.
So how much is what we have been seeing in recent years just part of that cycle? How much warmer is the Arctic now than it was 80 years ago?
Quite a lot, according to GISS.
But can we trust their figures? We saw previously how the temperature history for Paraguay, and a large slice of the surrounding region, had been altered as a result of temperature adjustments, which had significantly reduced historic temperatures and changed a cooling trend into a warming one.
I can now confirm that similar “cooling the past” adjustments have been carried out in the Arctic region, and that the scale and geographic range of these is breathtaking. Nearly every current station from Greenland, in the west, to the heart of Siberia (87E), in the east, has been altered in this way. The effect has been to remove a large part of the 1940’s spike, and as consequence removed much of the drop in temperatures during the subsequent cold decades.