David Flick wrote:.
.James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), has been at the forefront of the alarmist wing of climate scientists regarding the human influence on global climate from 1988 until today. He is the original AGW alarmist. Other than Al Gore, he is the world's best known AGW activist. Wikipedia paints him as something of a hero. Although the alarmists vehemently deny it, Hansen is well known for manipulating temperature data to push his agenda. Here is an article that delineates how he corrupted global temperature data.
David, this is slanderous. Hansen is a well respected scientist and not a manipulator of data in any biased manner. All data analysts "manipulate data” for data quality control, but honest ones do w/o biases as to results. To demonstrate Hansen’s (GISS) honesty, I'll post a chart and accompanying article that shows how 4 agencies (2 US, 1 British and 1 Japanese) have independently data analyzed the same DATA (historical surface temperature measurement) in different manners and come up with remarkable agreement.

Larger image available here
Accompanying article with explanation of the differences in data handling. All however, come up with the same story - rapid temp rise of about 0.9C since pre-industrial days. And I'll point out, that that temp rise is at least 6 times that of any other periodic (~130,000 years due to Miklanovitch cycles) temp rapid rises, all before human civilization. That is why it is referred to as “rapid”.
To boot the Koch Brothers were the biggest sponsor of a 2010 (Berkeley Earth Study Temperature-BEST) study that sought an independent review of all 39,000 land-based measurements. Koch brothers were no doubt hoping for proof that GISS/HADCRU/NCDC/JMA had erred in their data analysis by deleting measurements and they could go on polluting at will. So far BEST has dealt with the land based surface measurements and found remarkable agreement in temperature trends over 1850-20009 especially with the GISS and NCDC data (Had/CRU data was slightly less “alarming”). See below:

The 10 year average data shows BEST agreement is slightly better matched to the NASA/GISS and NOAA/NCDC data than the Had/CRU data:

BEST is headed up by a denialist-leaning* (at the time) scientist (Dr. Robert Muller) and included also Dr. Judith Curry a full-fledged denialist. In fact all the leaders were chosen because they were “climate skeptics". Yet here is their conclusion to the question Has global warming slowed down?:
Some people have suggested that there has been no global warming over the past 13 years, and they ask whether our land-only analysis verifies that. The graph shows the results of our analysis with 1-year averaging (to smooth it) for the last 6 decades so you can better see the period in question. The blue curve is the result of our analysis, and the grey lines represent our 95% confidence limits
The large fluctuations up and down that take place every few years correlate very strongly with the North Atlantic temperatures (the AMO index) and with El Nino (ENSO index 3.4). See our paper on "Decadal Variations in the Global Atmospheric Land Temperatures" for analysis of that. The presence of these fluctuations makes any strong extrapolations from short-term behavior uncertain.
Some people draw a line segment covering the period 1998 to 2010 and argue that we confirm no temperature change in that period. However, if you did that same exercise back in 1995, and drew a horizontal line through the data for 1980 to 1995, you might have falsely concluded that global warming had stopped back then. This exercise simply shows that the decadal fluctuations are too large to allow us to make decisive conclusions about long term trends based on close examination of periods as short as 13 to 15 years.
And here is their website which gives more details of their study which so far has not dealt with the ocean temps or attribution. But it has confirmed that the land surface temperature data is robust (not manipulated as David has slanderously claimed).
*Dr. Muller was the author of Physics for Presidents (2008) in which he points out the uncertainty about both GW and AGW (like denialists do) and recommends no action other than existing energy source efficiency improvements and conservation (see page 346, I have the book). While not the most outlandish denialist, he certainly tended that way. The BEST Study has apparently changed his mind. Sorry Koch Brothers your investment failed.
Here's some info on David’s slanderous source Steve Goddard (apparently not his real name). Even Anthony Watts had to throw him overboard.























