Steve Doocy Is An Idiot

And he got a "Pants on Fire" grade at Politifact.

Here's what he did, according to Politifact:

Fox News host Steve Doocy gave the doubters some ammunition on June 24, 2014. In a segment on Fox and Friends called "News by the Numbers," Doocy drew viewers’ attention to the year 1934.

"That's the hottest year on record in the United States," Doocy said. "At least until NASA scientists fudged the numbers to make 1998 the hottest year to overstate the extent of global warming. The 1930s were by far the hottest decade in the United States."

Interestingly, I had roughly this same debate on Facebook some months ago with a prominent local Pittsburgh conservative and his son (and so you can guess who they are). These two gentlemen are definitely not idiots but they used the same idiotic "the scientists fudged the raw data numbers!" argument.

It's incorrect then and it's incorrect now.

Politifact sets up it's debunkment:

We asked Fox News for their source and while they didn’t respond, a number of conservative news outlets have made much in recent days of a blog post from a man who writes under the pseudonym Steven Goddard. Goddard charged that until 2000, NASA reported that in the United States, 1934 was hotter than 1998 and that the country has been cooling since then.

And then the debunking:

As far as what the blog actually claimed, while it accurately copied the changes in the government charts, experts in U.S. temperature measurement say it ignores why the charts shifted. There were major changes in how the country gathered temperature information over the decades.

Zeke Hausfather is a data scientist with Berkeley Earth, a research group that has expressed doubts about some of the reports on climate change coming from Washington and international bodies. Hausfather took Goddard to task when Goddard made a similar claim about numbers fudging earlier this month. The missing piece in Goddard’s analysis, Hausfather said, was he ignored that the network of weather stations that feed data to the government today is not the one that existed 80 years ago.

"He is simply averaging absolute temperatures," Hausfather wrote. "Absolute temperatures work fine if and only if the composition of the station network remains unchanged over time."

Which it didn't.

What the actual scientists are doing is this: they are compensating for the messy data in the first place.  Even the climate skeptics agree that Goddard is incorrect:

John Nielsen-Gammon is a researcher at Texas A&M University and is the Texas state climatologist. Nielsen-Gammon finds nothing nefarious in the government analysis of temperature trends.

"It is reasonable to expect the adjusted data record to change over time as the technology for identifying and removing artificial changes improves," Nielsen-Gammon said. "If there are any biases, they are caused by the quality of the underlying data, not by any biases intentionally introduced into the adjustment process."

All of the experts we reached or whose work we read rejected Goddard’s conclusions.

Mark C. Serreze, professor of geography at the University of Colorado-Boulder, said no fabrication has taken place.

"Goddard's results stem from an erroneous analysis of the data," Serreze said.

Anthony Watts, a popular skeptic of most climate change data, posted his objection to Goddard’s claim.

"I took Goddard to task over this as well in a private email, saying he was very wrong and needed to do better," Watts wrote. [Emphasis added.]

The biggest problem that Doocy had with this data is that even if it was true (which it isn't) and it adequately reflected reality (which it doesn't), it was only data about the continental United States.  Even if it was true it would be a huge mistake to generalize it to a global frame of reference.

Meanwhile it's still getting warmer across the globe, no matter what Steve Doocy says.