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Steve Doocy of "Fox and Friends" said 1934 was the hottest year on record and NASA scientists "fudged the numbers" to make it seem cooler. Steve Doocy of "Fox and Friends" said 1934 was the hottest year on record and NASA scientists "fudged the numbers" to make it seem cooler.

Steve Doocy of "Fox and Friends" said 1934 was the hottest year on record and NASA scientists "fudged the numbers" to make it seem cooler.

Jon Greenberg
By Jon Greenberg June 25, 2014

Fox's Doocy: NASA fudged data to make the case for global warming

On climate change, Gallup pollsters say Americans divide into three groups -- the "Concerned Believers," the "Mixed Middle," and the "Cool Skeptics." Believers have a slender plurality at 39 percent but skeptics make up a solid 25 percent. They think there’s little to worry about and that media reports on the topic are exaggerated.

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."

A reader wondered if NASA really did cook the books (we love reader suggestions!), so we are checking Doocy’s claim about fudging the numbers.

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.

"Right after the year 2000, NASA and NOAA dramatically altered U.S. climate history, making the past much colder and the present much warmer," Goddard wrote.

He provided this animated chart to prove his point (the chart marked "a" is the old version):

Climate science experts say not so fast

Doocy exaggerated the findings in this blog post when he applied it to global warming. The post itself only talks about U.S. land temperatures and what happens in the United States is separate from global shifts.

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."

Weather stations that once were in a valley might now be on a hill top and vice versa. But the shift could be greater than simple elevation. Stations were moved from one part of a state to another. The number of stations within a given area shifted. All these differences, Hausfather and other experts said, will alter the typical temperatures gathered by government meteorologists.

Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said the raw data used in the blog post suffered from an equally troubling flaw. The temperatures were not measured at the same time of day.

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