Growls

As a result of accounting scandals at such corporate entities as Enron, Tyco International, and WorldCom, Congress enacted the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, according to Wikipedia. Section 404 of the act “requires management and the external auditor to report on the adequacy of the company's internal control over financial reporting.” Where are NASA's internal controls over climate change reporting?

Thanks to the United Kingdom’s Telegraph for reporting on the questionable numbers being used to to tout global warming. Yesterday’s Telegraph began:

“A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, (NASA’s) Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

“This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.”

Van Helsing at Moonbattery wraps it up nicely by writing:

“The GISS got the alarming numbers it wanted by carrying over some temperatures from the previous month. As even Al Gore probably knows, September tends to be warmer than October.

“Hansen et al. were caught not by the increasingly irrelevant mainstream media, but by the blogs Watts Up With That and Climate Audit. The GISS's response was to discover a new "hotspot" in the Arctic — despite the fact that sea ice there is 30% more extensive than it was at this point last year.” (the two blogs can be accessed via the Telegraph article)

Even worse, the Telegraph reported  that “last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question.”

Thanks to their belief that global warming is caused by human activity, the Arlington County Board approved a residential utility tax on the consumption of electricity and natural gas when they adopted the FY 2008 budget in April 2007. Both taxes were capped at $3.00 each with the money used to pay for, among other things, their FreshAIRE initiative.

Two questions, at least! First, are the internal controls at NASA, including those involving the reporting about global warming, as good as those in the private sector. This seems especially important since the chairman of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was established to be “an objective source of information about climate change, is “a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, according to the Telegraph.

Second, will the Arlington County Board now admit they had little or no real scientific basis for initiating their FreshAIRE initiative, and, consequently, there is no need for the revenue from the residential utility tax? Yet today, the Arlington County bureaucrats will donate 1,000 of the so-called compact flourescent light bulbs to three affordable housing providers -- AHC, Paradigm, and Wesley Housing, according to the online Arlington Sun-Gazette.