Hmmm, MSU must have a degree course in "serving the dark master".

The Great Lakes were nice and warm in 2005 when I went swimming there, but I don't recall using them to make my morning hard boiled eggs.

Little note, the article makes note that the chart laughably has a disclaimer that it is not to be used for navigation. All maps of navigable waters that are not produced by the country in question's hydrographic agency are required by law to have that disclaimer.

While I certainly don't have any belief in the ethical purity of someone's work just because they have some letters after their name any more, I do think this clearly has to be an example of the kind of screw-up that can happen to anyone, rather than further malicious data cooking.

If someone was trying to bias the raw data in favour of a warming trend you don't put in temperatures high enough to suggest the lake would have boiled away, any more than (any but the craziest) student would say, "Aliens hijacked my homework" rather than "The dog peed on it".

I'm not a big fan of egregious incompetence either, but this just looks too ludicrous and extreme to be anything but a one-off honest screw up.

I tend to agree with you, Stephen.

On the other hand, if someone were to intentionally bias a data set, wouldn't a few brief and outrageous errors sprinkled throughout be better suited to achieving one's goal than nudging a whole lot of temps in the direction you wanted?

The first method generates plausible deniability for the perpetrator - as you have just demonstrated.

Stephen,

As soon as they use the CLN (Chicken Little Network) to admit the error and roll back the fear they've been creating over the last half century, we can start thinking it is anything but intentional fraud.

They make their money by government grants. I'm expecting my refund any day now. Are you?

Looks like someone entered the wrong formula/function into the spreadsheet cells to me.

They're blaming it on the satellite now.

Those lake temperatures are hot enough to cook someone's goose.

So that's where all the global warming got to....

@ Stephen J: Either way, screwup or not, it does raise the question of how many other screwups there are? If we are going to change the entire economy, and make the poor even more poor, then we'd better be sure our evidence is solid.

As a scientist, I am first to admit, science is fallable and very few things are "no longer debateable".

lake michigan steams , like a young mans dreams - , sing it gord

Ummmmmmm.....maybe those temps are in Kelvin??? But if that were so....then half the lake should be ice covered.
Or maybe they need a new starting point for Mann's next hockey stick.
The only thing warming is the amount of man's stupidity for believing this crap!

Look at the "range" of temperatures for an homogenous body of water: 481 vs 98 in just a few "short" miles. Anything is possible for these guys.

Gotta be a hot spot under Lake Michigan, warn the locals - volcano!

IT'S WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT!!!!!!!!!1111!!!

It isn't so much the fact the 350 F is wrong. What is not clear is if it was noticed and what was done about it. Errors happen but must be explained. If a number like that is not noticed then funding should be cut because none of it has credibility. I worked with the mindset of we can save this. No you can't. Eventually the reason to perform a function is no longer relevant and only serves to waste someone elses money.

When it comes to the modern day Lysenkoism of exaggerated AGW, forget peer review, they obviously don't even conduct simple grade 5 level editing review.

Errors happen. Yes. But why are all the errors shading towards exaggerating the trends that support warming?

The errors shown are indeed laughable. However, not so funny if they have now become part of an "average" that seems to support warming and will now become part of the ammunition used to persuade the world that man made climate change is happening and the only solution is to give the UN more money. It wouldn't take too many 200F numbers to make a significant difference in the eventual average.

Inadvertent perhaps. Important thing is, have they been corrected? And were those numbers used for anything before they were corrected?

Perhaps those are in rankine not Fahrenheit and the entire lake is frozen solid?

Did anyone bother driving out to the beech to take a look?

Thank you Sportsmen.

OMG , where are my manners?
Thank you Kate.

lord lord lord. at first I thought I was looking at Kelvin readings but then . . . .

lord lord lord.

So is the high temperatures over water because they didn't think anyone would look there or because no one can refute it with actual measurements?

The islands and bays are for sportsmen ... in Kevlar suits.

Item # 1:

These boffins expect respect for "authority" and yet the higher standard they claim....they abdicate by not taking simple due diligence.

GISS and NOAA claimed June was the hotest june in ???? based upon averaging including "estimated" temperatures (+4 C) for the high arctic...because they had no thermometers north of 80.....IOW they simply made it up.

Meanwhile the drifting cameras at the North Pole indicate snow on re-frozen melt-water pools....

Remember these same fools claim Antarctica is melting at -30C.........

"On the other hand, if someone were to intentionally bias a data set, wouldn't a few brief and outrageous errors sprinkled throughout be better suited to achieving one's goal than nudging a whole lot of temps in the direction you wanted?"

If there were, like, two or three 100+ degree temps in an otherwise-closely-hewing-to-normal data set, I'd buy that. But the lowest temperature in that little thumbnail above is 98.1.

Besides, the thing about using just one or two outliers to skew your sample set is precisely what Steve McIntyre found had happened in the tree-ring data Keith Briffa used in providing source material for Michael Mann's hockey stick. Assuming that was deliberate*, it's got to be fairly obvious that people know to look for such things now, and anyone minded to put a deliberate deception into the data would have to do it a little more subtly and carefully.

(* I acknowledge the possibility that there was enough right-hand/left-hand communication gaps in the AGW research community that Mann didn't realize how outlier-dependent Briffa's data was (or Briffa didn't realize how vital his one outlier was to Mann's result) until the "hockey stick" was out in public and they were both committed to backing it up. It's usually been my experience that dishonesty is used far more often to cover up mistakes rather than simply lie flat out about results. But I confess I've been underwhelmed enough by AGW advocates to no longer assume this as a default.)

In climatology, second-raters get promoted and do sloppy work. First-raters get blacklisted. Believe me, I know.

I also know that Lake Michigan normally registers somewhere between 60 and 75 F in July, there have been episodes recently where cold water upwelling near eastern Wisconsin showed temperatures as low as 50 F.

Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when Lake Michigan starts to boil over?

rita posted at August 15, 2010 1:40 PM "Errors happen. Yes. But why are all the errors shading towards exaggerating the trends that support warming?"

My father had a saying, "Everybody makes mistakes, but ain't it funny how the mistakes are always in their favor?" Referring to the banks, govt, businesses, etc.

Hey, it looks like they were doing this in broad daylight?

What nerve, how stupid.

We are winning eh?

Have they responded to, or attempted to explaine, these (obviously incorrect) numbers?

No those numbers are correct. The UEA approved them.

This data should have been embargoed. Perhaps behind the Boilin' Wall...