Those darn experts!

Quite the read last week and today regarding those experts and their (somewhat) scientific rationale for global warming and/or cooling (both?):

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.

So far so good:

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.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

Undoubtedly the "experts" called oops, we screwed the pooch on that one. Hardly:

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer
melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that
the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

One can imagine a faux conversation regarding this matter. Perhaps a conversation between a member of the coal-faced great unwashed and said experts:

Coal-face: Gosh, looks like these numbers will mean you have to revise your alarming forecasts.
Expert: Not at all. We just experienced some out-lying parametric data set incongruity.
Coal-face: But if the data was incorrect shouldn't that result in changes in the predictions?
Expert: Quite the opposite. We harmonised additional pre-existing data sets included in the original projections which abrogated the need for further clarification. If anything, the incorrect information further re-inforces our original conclusions.
Coal-face: But if the additional data already featured in the original data set does that mean it was wrong too?
Expert: Listen, I have to get to a meeting. Maybe we can talk later?

Where would we be without our betters?