“As long as a public official is on the public payroll, his first loyalty is to his constituency, not to some outside pressure group calling on people to break the law,” Miller said.

Hansen and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) he heads have been accused on several occasions of falsifying data to make global warming appear to be a crisis. In November 2008, Hansen claimed October 2008 was the warmest October on record. In fact, October temperatures were at the long-term average. [...]

Hansen’s techniques were recently exposed on the Web site of meteorologist Anthony Watts (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/08/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-79-would-you-could-you-with-a-boat/) for adjusting raw temperature data to make a long-term cooling trend recorded by a climate monitoring station in New Mexico look like a warming trend.