Phil Jones of CRU Infamy Ate the Raw Data

For years the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University, the supposedly most respected climate research group in the world according to the UN IPCC, either hid the fact that the raw land surface data was long ago lost or he has recently destroyed it as he said he would do if he were forced to turn it over to critics of the catastrophic AGW hypothesis.  Either way, the man is guilty of serious fraud.

The scientific fraud is also overwhelming.  The data has been manipulated and altered many times.  According to the internal journal of a CRU researcher trying to reproduce results published by CRU scientists, those manipulations and changes were not properly documented.  He was unable to reproduce the published results.  There is no mention on his part of his being able to examine the raw data, either.  Yet, Jones wrote e-mails a number of times that implied that he had the raw data in the context that he would destroy it if necessary.  This may well have been a pretense.  He may have been too embarrassed by not having the raw data to even allow his conspiracy colleagues to know that.  If he did, he would have looked so incompetent even to them that he could not have kept up the appearance that the CRU was the leading research group in climate science in the world.  He may have been desperate to keep up the appearance that he was at least a scientist, even if one willing to bend the facts a bit to back his favored hypothesis from the viewpoint of his colleagues.  I think he bent the facts into pretzels and fashioned an alternative universe.

It is interesting to read the many newspaper and news magazine articles (see this Times article as an example) that are still trying to maintain that there is a consensus among scientists for catastrophic AGW and that the information released in the CRU document dump is not important.  The misrepresentations are truly awful.  On the other hand, there are some good assessments also being done.  See this Washington Times article as an example.