House of Commons Investigates ClimateGate - Institute of Physics Comments

In the United Kingdom, the House of Commons is investigating the ClimateGate issues out of the CRU at the University of East Anglia and the use of unscientific sources for many claims made in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007. The Institute of Physics of the U.K. has submitted a memorandum to the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons Parliament on 5 March 2010. It reads:

The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia

The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of over 36,000 and is a leading communicator of physics-related science to all audiences, from specialists through to government and the general public. Its publishing company, IOP Publishing, is a world leader in scientific publishing and the electronic dissemination of physics.

The Institute is pleased to submit its views to inform the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee's inquiry, 'The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia'.

The submission details our response to the questions listed in the call for evidence, which was prepared with input from the Institute's Science Board, and its Energy Sub-group.

What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself - most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC's conclusions on climate change.

3. It is important to recognise that there are two completely different categories of data set that are involved in the CRU e-mail exchanges:

• those compiled from direct instrumental measurements of land and ocean surface temperatures such as the CRU, GISS and NOAA data sets; and
• historic temperature reconstructions from measurements of 'proxies', for example, tree-rings.

4. The second category relating to proxy reconstructions are the basis for the conclusion that 20th century warming is unprecedented. Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information.

5. The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.

6. There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the

e-mails. This impedes the process of scientific 'self correction', which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself. In that context, those CRU e-mails relating to the peer-review process suggest a need for a review of its adequacy and objectivity as practised in this field and its potential vulnerability to bias or manipulation.

7. Fundamentally, we consider it should be inappropriate for the verification of the integrity of the scientific process to depend on appeals to Freedom of Information legislation. Nevertheless, the right to such appeals has been shown to be necessary. The e-mails illustrate the possibility of networks of like-minded researchers effectively excluding newcomers. Requiring data to be electronically accessible to all, at the time of publication, would remove this possibility.

8. As a step towards restoring confidence in the scientific process and to provide greater transparency in future, the editorial boards of scientific journals should work towards setting down requirements for open electronic data archiving by authors, to coincide with publication. Expert input (from journal boards) would be needed to determine the category of data that would be archived. Much 'raw' data requires calibration and processing through interpretive codes at various levels.

9. Where the nature of the study precludes direct replication by experiment, as in the case of time-dependent field measurements, it is important that the requirements include access to all the original raw data and its provenance, together with the criteria used for, and effects of, any subsequent selections, omissions or adjustments. The details of any statistical procedures, necessary for the independent testing and replication, should also be included. In parallel, consideration should be given to the requirements for minimum disclosure in relation to computer modelling.

Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate?

10. The scope of the UEA review is, not inappropriately, restricted to the allegations of scientific malpractice and evasion of the Freedom of Information Act at the CRU. However, most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other leading institutions involved in the formulation of the IPCC's conclusions on climate change. In so far as those scientists were complicit in the alleged scientific malpractices, there is need for a wider inquiry into the integrity of the scientific process in this field.

11. The first of the review's terms of reference is limited to: "...manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice..." The term 'acceptable' is not defined and might better be replaced with 'objective'.

12. The second of the review's terms of reference should extend beyond reviewing the CRU's policies and practices to whether these have been breached by individuals, particularly in respect of other kinds of departure from objective scientific practice, for example, manipulation of the publication and peer review system or allowing pre-formed conclusions to override scientific objectivity.

How independent are the other two international data sets?

13. Published data sets are compiled from a range of sources and are subject to processing and adjustments of various kinds. Differences in judgements and methodologies used in such processing may result in different final data sets even if they are based on the same raw data. Apart from any communality of sources, account must be taken of differences in processing between the published data sets and any data sets on which they draw.

The Institute of Physics

February 2010

The Institute of Physics is clearly responding more rationally to events regarding the scientific conduct of many major proponents of catastrophic man-made global warming than is the American Physical Society. I am very disappointed yet in the American Physical Society's response to more than 250 present and past members of that society for a review of its thoughtless backing of catastrophic AGW back in 2007. I will be discussing this more in the future.

Prof. Phil Jones Admits No Significant Warming since 1995

Following the ClimateGate e-mail and documents dump scandal, the then director of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, was asked to step down while an investigation of such things as his refusal to provide data requested under a freedom of information act was underway.  Phil Jones was a principal author on the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007.

In an interview on the BBC on 13 February 2010, Phil Jones admitted that (here and here):

• There has been no "statistically significant" warming since 1995.
• The warming periods of 1860 to 1880, 1910 to 1940, and 1975 to 1998 were very similar and could all be explained by natural forces.
• The data and papers the hockey stick graph used prominently in the last two UN IPCC reports is based on has been lost.  The hockey stick temperature record was the basis for a claim of unprecedented warming recently, which was attributed to man's CO2 emissions due to using fossil fuels.
• The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) may have been warmer than now and recently, but there is insufficient data from the tropics and the southern hemisphere to be sure of that.  He says the MWP is best expressed in North America, the North Atlantic and Europe, and parts of Asia.

Wow, is Phil Jones' fall from being a top global warming alarmist scientist amazing evidence of the collapse of this scientific foolishness, or what?

Strangely enough, though Phil Jones concedes that the warmings from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998 are remarkably similar and may be entirely natural events and he says that no statistically significant warming has occurred since 1995, he also claims that only man-made warming effects can explain the warming since 1998!  Now this is a simple breakdown of logic and reveals how strongly the religion of man-made global warming has its claws sunk into him.

Note also that the warmth of the MWP can hardly be ignored for the North Atlantic,  Europe, and parts of Asia, because there are plentiful human records of the crops grown, the extent of glaciers, and the natural flora and fauna of the time from those areas.  North America and many of those areas have been particularly subject to scientific studies as well.  But, there is much less land in the Southern Hemisphere, especially if the unpopulated Antarctica is discounted, and none of it was settled by advanced civilizations that kept significant written records.  His claim that warming in the tropics should also be shown before the MWP is thought of as a global warming is actually showing ignorance of the science of the Earth's climate.  When the Earth warms from temperatures similar to those we have now, the temperature in the tropics is hardly changed at all.  The reason is that water evaporates so much more quickly there with any warming.  In evaporation, the absorption of heat from the environment to turn liquid water into vapor has a counteracting cooling effect.  This effect is large, since it takes a lot of heat to vaporize water.  As a result, the temperature of the tropics tends to be quite stable even when the warming at higher latitudes is significant.

Prof. Phil Jones wrote in a dumped e-mail that he would destroy the temperature data before he would turn it over in response to freedom of information act requests.  Is losing the data the same as destroying it?  Maybe he lost it in a trash dumpster in Northumberland.  He claimed in the interview that his office was so piled with papers that maybe it was lost there.  He admitted that he was not a good record-keeper.

Dr. Benny Pieser, director of the skeptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, noted that Prof. Phil Jones had shared his data with colleagues and 'mates', so the claim that he had lost the data did not ring true.  He went on to say that this was Phil Jones' first admission that the science of global warming was not settled.

Folks, it is much worse than that.  Phil Jones was one of the most cited scientists in the scientific literature as an authority on catastrophic man-made global warming.  Now, he clearly has no evidence for any warming since 1995 and he has said the earlier warming from 1975 to 1998 was no different than that from 1910 to 1940, so there is simply no longer any late 20th Century warming that can be claimed to be unprecedented and/or due to man's use of fossil fuels!  Whether he lost the hockey stick data or not is now irrelevant with respect to the catastrophic man-made global warming argument.  He has already logically admitted that the hockey stick temperature graph is wrong!  And prior to this, every effort was made by the scientists in his alarmist cabal to erase the Medieval Warm Period, but now we have his confession that he is not at all sure that it can be erased!

The catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW) science house of cards has collapsed very rapidly.  Unfortunately, it is hanging in there in much of the media and in the Democrat Party.  The Economist and even Forbes Magazine have had recent articles assuming its truth.  The EPA has failed to reopen consideration of its foolish recent declaration that CO2 is a pollutant which it must regulate tightly under the Clean Air Act.  The Obama administration has announced the formation of a new department under NOAA to serve as a central government advocate for catastrophic man-made global warming, though they name it as simply a climate research and study department.  The momentum of the religious movement for catastrophic AGW rumbles on, even after its obvious scientific collapse.

But, fewer independents and fewer Republicans now believe in it.  Even among Democrats, some have now become atheists or agnostics.  It will take time for the media and the politicians to correct themselves, but most of them will either do so or simply stop advocating it.  I am sure the latter option will be the more popular.  We can expect to hear few apologies from those who so strongly advocated shutting off our inexpensive fuel supplies, making our electricity system much less reliable and much more expensive, causing coal miners and oil refinery and pipeline workers to lose their jobs, many a manufacturing industry to move abroad, and many homes and workplaces to be cold in the winter and hot in the summer.  The false claims of catastrophic AGW will simply fade away.  Eventually.

We should remember who took the wrong side on this very important issue.  People such as Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Reid, Markey, Waxman, McCain, Lieberman, Bayh, Boxer, Feingold, Gillibrand, Inouye, Leahy, Mikulski, Murray, Schumer, Specter, Wyden, Edwards, Hoyer, Kratovil, and Van Hollen should all be thrown out of office as soon as possible.  Meanwhile, Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma has been a long-time foe of the hypothesis of catastrophic AGW and this should be remembered to his advantage.

NOAA is Fountainhead of Exaggerated Temperature Data

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) operates the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina.  This center produces the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), which is a land surface temperature record from around the world.  This data set is not just raw temperature data, but is temperature station temperature measurements averaged in a grid across the Earth.  This data is supplied to the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University, which performs further data manipulations upon the data.  The data was also supplied to the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where their temperature data sets were examined more closely following the dump of many documents that occurred in late November.  The fourth most significant set of temperatures comes from Japan, but their database is also based upon the NOAA GHCN temperature database.  Despite the use of the same basic set of manipulated data by NOAA, NASA, and the CRU, they used to and often still do pretend that each fully manipulated data set came to very similar conclusions independently.

Recent analysis by computer expert E. Mike Smith and the certified consulting meteorologist Joseph D'Aleo has shown manipulations of the GHCN which have had the effect of greatly exaggerating the rise of temperatures in the late 20th Century, as well as in the first decade of the present century.  The analysis was so blatantly designed for that purpose, that it is unavoidable to say that an agency of our government was knowingly lying to the American People and abusing the good name of the United States throughout the world.  How was this perfidy performed?  I have discussed a number of aspects of this huge effort to distort the temperature data to support a theory of sudden highly unusual temperature rise in the late 20th Century and a sustained high in the first decade of this century in a number of posts in November and December.  I will add to that story here.

First, the GHCN was based on a few tens of reporting stations until about 1870, then the number grew rapidly until about 1920 when it was more than 1300 stations.  There was another growth in the number in the late 1940s with more than 1700 stations reporting temperatures.  About 1970 the numbers started to drop, but remained above 1500 until about 1990.  In the late 1990s, the number of temperature readings entered into the GHCN database dropped precipitously to a few hundred, though the number of stations still reporting data did not drop anywhere near so rapidly.  E. Mike Smith and Joseph D'Aleo show that the high altitude and high latitude station data was preferentially dropped from the data set, as was rural data.  The weight of the reported data stations moved south in the northern hemisphere as well.  More coastal and more airport (hardly ever close to cities, right?) station data was included.  Colder stations were systematically not entered into the data set.  To make up for the missing data in many grids around the world, temperature values were made up for those grids based on stations as far as 1200 km away.  Thus mountain data might be based on the data of two cities with large urban heat island effects.  See the story as told by Joseph D'Aleo here and by E. Mike Smith here.

The GHCN data shows warming in only a fraction of the reported grid areas and they are mostly in the higher latitudes and in mountainous regions.  I earlier discussed the effect on Russia.  D'Aleo notes that:

In Canada the number of stations dropped from 600 to 35 in 2009. The percentage of stations in the lower elevations (below 300 feet) tripled and those at higher elevations above 3000 feet were reduced in half. Canada’s semi-permanent depicted warmth comes from interpolating from more southerly locations to fill northerly vacant grid boxes, even as a pure average of the available stations shows a COOLING. Just 1 thermometer remains for everything north of latitude 65N – that station is Eureka. Eureka according to Wikipedia has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to the flora and fauna abundant around the Eureka area, more so than anywhere else in the High Arctic. Winters are frigid but summers are slightly warmer than at other places in the Canadian Arctic.

China had 100 stations in 1950, over 400 in 1960 then only 35 by 1990. Temperatures reflected these station distribution changes. CRU’s own Phil Jones showed in 2008 peer review paper that contamination by urbanization in China was 1.8F per century. Neither NOAA nor CRU adjusts for this contamination. NASA to their credit, makes an attempt to adjust for urbanization, but outside the United States, the lack of updated population data has NASA adjusting cities with data from other cities with about as many stations warming as cooling.

High elevation stations have disappeared from the data base. Stations in the Andes and Bolivia have vanished. Temperatures for these areas are now determined by interpolation from stations hundreds of miles away on the coast or in the Amazon.

Of course, other adjustments have been applied to the measured temperature data, with the data shown to the public being only this data.  These adjustments are often times made frequently and are undocumented.  I previously discussed a comparison of so-called unadjusted data for Central Park and data which was said to be adjusted, but it turns out that even unadjusted data is not raw temperature data.  From D'Aleo,

The older temperatures were adjusted downward, as though fewer people were on Manhattan Island and less energy was used in earlier times than now!  Similar adjustments were made to some so-called rural stations also.  Here is the result for Davis, California, the nearest "rural" station to San Francisco, though it is a town of more than 60,000 people and is a suburb of Sacramento.  The recent drop of reported stations has resulted in only 4 stations for the entire state of California.  Three of those stations are along the coast in the Los Angeles area and the Davis station is the only one left in the mid-latitudes of the state.  So, what has NOAA done to the only reported station in the recent record outside of the coastal LA area?

The pre-1960 data was adjusted downward to change a net cooling after about 1908 into a net warming.  This would possibly make sense if the population of Davis and nearby Sacramento had been much larger in 1880 and then they had shrunk in size drastically until 1960, when the population became stable.  But, that certainly did not happen, now did it?  Now, if you are going to represent the large state of California with only 4 station temperature histories in recent times and you want to tell everyone that there has been no cooling since 1998, this is a great way to do it.  Drop all the station readings in the mountains of CA and drop those from the northern third of the state entirely only for those pesky recent times when the catastrophic AGW theory says temperatures must remain high.  Keep the many cooler station temperature inputs, of course, for earlier times so that the temperature record will have a recent rise.  Having stations which are really in urban areas is the way to go and the manipulations are time consuming enough that you do not want to have to do them on too many station's temperature data, so just keep a few urban results.

There is a huge pattern of falsifying the temperature record performed by our own government for the purpose of misleading the American People and the people of the rest of the world.  This is a blatant power grab by the government to tax, regulate, and limit the use of energy.  This data provides the justification for the EPA to condemn CO2 as a pollutant and to heavily regulate all energy users.  It is an excuse to offer subsidies and mandates to favor certain alternative energy industries and certain so-called green companies.  These industries and companies can be counted upon to offer frequent bribes, called campaign contributions, to the politicians who gain this power.  This data is also the basis for an increase in effective world governance of Americans by a UN dominated by governments which do not hold the rights of the individual as sovereign or even worthy of respect.  This fraud has been perpetrated for the purpose of advancing socialism and world government.

The scalawags and scoundrels of NOAA and NASA must be kicked out of the government for fraud and denied their pensions and benefits.  The EPA administrators who claimed CO2 was a pollutant based on their data showed sufficiently bad judgment that they should be demoted to GS9 level positions.  Those in the House of Representatives who voted for carbon cap and trade should all be turned out of office in the 2010 election for their awful judgment.  Any Congressman who was willing to do so much damage to the American economy and to destroy so many jobs on the basis of such flim-flam artistry has no business making our critical national legislation.  Those Senators who have supported the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis as being correct, should also be retired.  Such fools should never be permitted such power.

Britain's Met Office Predicted a Mild Winter Ever -- For the Third Time In a Row

Christopher Booker reports in the Telegraph that "the serial inaccuracy" of the Met Office climate forecasts in Great Britain is no longer just a joke, but a national scandal.  He goes on to say:

The reason the Met Office so persistently gets its seasonal forecasts wrong is that it has been hi-jacked from the role for which we pay it nearly £200 million a year, to become one of the world's major propaganda engines for the belief in man-made global warming. Over the past three years, it has become a laughing stock for forecasts which are invariably wrong in the same direction.

The year 2007, it predicted, would be "the warmest ever" – just before global tempratures plunged by more than the entire net warming of the 20th century, Three years running it predicted warmer than average winters – as large parts of the northern hemisphere endured record cold and snowfalls. Last year's "barbecue summer" was the third time running that predictions of a summer drier and warmer than average prefaced weeks of rain and cold. Last week the Met Office was again predicting that 2010 will be the "warmest year" on record, while Europe and the US look to be facing further weeks of intense cold.

What is not generally realised is that the UK Met Office has been, since 1990, at the very centre of the campaign to convince the world that it faces catastrophe through global warming. (Its website now proclaims it to be "the Met Office for Weather and Climate Change".) Its then-director, Dr John Houghton, was the single most influential figure in setting up the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the chief driver of climate alarmism. Its Hadley Centre for Climate Change, along with the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), was put in charge of the most prestigious of the four official global temperature records. In line with IPCC theory, its computers were programmed to predict that, as CO2 levels rose, temperatures would inevitably follow. From 1990 to 2007, the Department of the Environment gave the Met Office no less than £146 million for its "climate predictions programme".

But in the past three years, with the Met Office chaired by Robert Napier, a former global warming activist and previously head of WWF UK, its pretensions have been exposed as never before. The "Climategate" leak of documents from the CRU, along with further revelations from Russian scientists, have shown the CRU/Met Office alliance systematically manipulating temperature data, past and present, to show the world growing warmer than the evidence justified. And those same computers used to predict temperatures 100 years ahead for the IPCC have also been used to produce those weather forecasts that prove so consistently wrong.

It will be equally instructive to take note of the weather of the last several years in the U.S. and worldwide. The climate models so highly touted by the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 and the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists have not been predicting the climate of the period since 2001 well at all. The outcome of the predictions is always warmer than the actuality, even when the actual raw temperature measurements have been manipulated to make them look warmer than they really are. If the climate models are not good for any particular year and not good for any particular decade, then why should we have much confidence in them for 50 to 100 year predictions? It seems clear we would be foolish to expect much of them in light of the fact that there are clearly climate factors which the models do not have a grasp on. The climate prediction models of the Met, Hadley Centre, and the CRU of the University of East Anglia are clearly clueless. I would suggest this is because they are biased to predict an excessive effect due to CO2 emissions and because they do not yet understand the natural forces on the climate.

Some Examples of Serious AGW Problems Emphasized by the CRU E-mail Dump

The recent dump of e-mails, documents, and programs from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia by a probable whistle-blower has made the manufactured consensus and the problems of the science by the catastrophic AGW alarmists all the more apparent.  Here are a few nuggets:

Much attention has been given to Michael Mann’s (Pennsylvania State University) and Keith Briffa's (CRU) proxy temperature data hockey stick data sets. Briffa was conflicted in this whole process, noting he “[tried] hard to balance the needs of the IPCC with science, which were not always the same.  He felt “there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data.’”

Programmer Ian “Harry” Harris, in the Harry_Read_Me.txt file, commented about:

[The] hopeless state of their (CRU) data base. … No uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found. … I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case?Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. …
This whole project is SUCH A MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!
I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can’t get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the updateprog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections – to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?

Here is an e-mail from Tom Wigley, the former head of the CRU and now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, to Phil Jones, the recent head of the CRU in which he expresses concern about Keith Briffa's work:

Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:57:57 -0600
From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones Subject: Re: [geo] Re: CCNet: A Scientific Scandal Unfolds…
139.222.131.184
Phil,
It is distressing to read that American Stinker item. But Keith does seem to have got himself into a mess. As I pointed out in emails, Yamal is insignificant....
But, more generally, (even if it *is* irrelevant) how does Keith explain the McIntyre plot that compares Yamal-12 with Yamal-all? And how does he explain the apparent “selection” of the less well-replicated chronology rather that the later (better replicated) chronology?
Of course, I don’t know how often Yamal-12 has really been used in recent, post-1995, work. I suspect from what you say it is much less often that M&M [McIntyre and fellow sceptic Professor Ross McKitrick] say—but where did they get their information? I presume they went thru papers to see if Yamal was cited, a pretty foolproof method if you ask me.
Perhaps these things can be explained clearly and concisely—but I am not sure Keith is able to do this as he is too close to the issue and probably quite pissed of.
And the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato, one that affects both you and Keith (and Mann). Yes, there are reasons—but many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The
trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something, and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden.
I think Keith needs to be very, very careful in how he handles this. I’d be willing to check over anything he puts together.
Tom.


Wigley protested Michael Mann's sending a deceptive graph with a “fluke” result to back up Wigley’s contention that the recent cooling was still consistent with overall warming. He also claimed the IPCC and AGW scientists had made too many “dishonest presentations”.

On Oct 14, 2009, at 5:57 PM, Tom Wigley wrote:
Mike,
The Figure you sent is very deceptive. As an example, historical runs with PCM look as though they match observations—but the match is a fluke. PCM has no indirect aerosol forcing and a low climate sensitivity—compensating errors. In my (perhaps too harsh) view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC. This is why I still use results from MAGICC to compare with observed temperatures. At least here I can assess how sensitive matches are to sensitivity and forcing assumptions/uncertainties.
Tom.

Here is another matter discussed by Andrew Bolt:

The IPCC’s 2007 report made an allowance that drew heavily on a 1990 paper by Phil Jones that dismissed the UHI effect as largely trivial. That in turn drew heavily on a paper by Professor Wang Wei-Chyung of Albany, State University of New York, which presented data from China which both Wang and Jones claimed came from stations that had “few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times”, and so could be relied upon.

Mathematician Doug Keenan and others obtained the original Wang data and used it to track down the Chinese weather stations. They found that 49 of the 84 stations used actually had no records of station location, eight had inconsistent histories, 18 had been moved a considerable distance, and only seven were known not to have been relocated. One station had five different locations in 30 years as far as 41 km apart.

Wang seemed to have lied. His data was essentially worthless, and Jones’ (and the IPCC’s) claim that the Urban Heat Island effect was trivial now seemed unsupported by solid evidence.

These and many more documents have served to make it ever clearer that the catastrophic AGW hypothesis is mighty dubious.  The hockey stick data of Keith Briffa, the claim that the urban heat island effect is unimportant, and the reliability of the basic land surface temperature data sets are all key points undermined by these documents.

Patrick Michaels on the Manufactured Climate Consensus

Patrick J. Michaels served as a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia from 1980 to 2007.  He was also for a number of years the official Virginia state climatologist, before a Democrat governor decided to change that.  However, he fell out of favor with the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming alarmist scientists when he published papers saying that while there was human-induced warming of the Earth, it was less than that produced by the climate models at the time.  Feelings were so strong that a Ben Santer, a student of Tom Wigley then and now at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, offered to beat up Michaels if he encountered him at a scientific meeting in an e-mail to Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.

Patrick Michaels describes how the catastrophic AGW alarmists manufactured a so-called consensus of climate scientists by shutting out the skeptics and those who claimed this hypothesis was wrong.

More on Weather Station Unreliability

Joseph D'Aleo, AMS Fellow, CCM has posted an interesting piece called How bad is the global temperature data? at Watts Up With That?  Among the problems, see what has happened to the number of reporting weather stations in the NOAA GHCH, which we now know to be the source of the raw temperature data for NASA's GISS and for Hadley's CRU:

Given that the rural stations are the only ones perhaps not suffering from heat island effects, the greater fractional decrease in rural stations will certainly bias the land surface temperature record upward.  The last thing that should be happening is a decrease in the number of rural stations.  A decrease in the number of urban and suburban stations is good.  It is good that there are more suburban than urban stations now, but this is hardly able to make amends for the severe lack of rural stations, especially given that a much larger fraction of the Earth's surface is rural than either urban or suburban.  This higher weight of urban and suburban stations is likely to bias the temperature upward strongly.

D'Aleo also points out that the Pipogenus Dam weather station site in Maine, which had been reporting data since 1925, was officially closed in 1995.  However, the NOAA USHCN database of land surface temperature data reports data from the date of closing to at least 2006.  Not surprisingly, the data after 1995 averages higher than the data before the station was closed!  See that data below:

The survey of the climate stations in Maine found that everyone of them had microclimate or urbanization biases of the temperature data.

As I have noted before, the land surface temperature data is simply not reliable.

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.

Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Evidence Was Not Even Evidence

The primary evidence offered in the UN IPCC reports of 2001 and 2007 for the catastrophic effect of man's carbon dioxide emissions was that there was no natural force that could explain the rapid rise of temperatures in the late 20th Century, so it must have been due to the increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.  This is a dangerous kind of argument to make in any case, since the science of the way in which CO2 itself might be making such a rapid temperature increase as was claimed was itself weak and because the list of understood natural effects on climate was known to be quite incomplete.  But, this was nonetheless the argument that convinced many scientists, most of the media, most politicians, and many of the People that catastrophic AGW was a very good reason for drastically changing the way we live, even if it meant a massive economic slowdown, a huge loss of jobs, unreliable and much more expensive energy, and maybe even cold buildings in winters and hot buildings in the summers.

The recent massive release of documents from the most respected of the pro-AGW climate research centers, that of the CRU of the University of East Anglia, showed that there was what can only be called a conspiracy among the small group of climate scientists who played the biggest role in promoting the idea of catastrophic AGW.  The major American and Canadian scientists were closely involved along with many of the major scientists in the United Kingdom and others of the European Union.  I have earlier discussed some of the problems already discovered with the Michael Mann land temperature proxy and some aspects of the Briffa land data series of proxy temperatures.  These two series of reconstructed temperatures from earlier times both produced hockey stick temperature records in which the warmth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) (900 to 1300 AD) was minimized to appear to be much less than that of the late 20th Century despite considerable evidence from other sources that the MWP was actually warmer than the recent period.  These series also tended to minimize the decrease in temperatures of the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850) and moderate the temperature increase prior to 1940.  From about 1940 to 1976 there was cooling and then the land instrumental temperature record kept by the CRU and by the NASA GISS took off with very rapid temperature increases from 1976 to 1998.  This land instrumental record was doctored and affected by heat island effects to make global temperatures seem to rise at a faster rate in this period than they actually did.

It was long known that the catastrophic AGW scientists wanted to hide the warm temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) due to statements one of the in-group made to a scientist he thought was one of them, but who had too much integrity and spoke publicly about the wish to minimize the historical evidence of the MWP.  The recent release of documents has brought forth many more issues of unscientific tampering with the temperature measurement record.  The most famous such issue of the moment is the "Hide the Decline" issue relating to a temperature proxy series by Briffa, one of the most cited and influential AGW scientists.  His proxy temperature data set from tree ring studies used the tree ring data set up to 1960 and then spliced in the instrumental temperature data set from then on.  The decline being hidden was not the decline in temperatures since about 1998, but was a substantial decline in temperatures inferred from the tree ring data over the period from 1960 to the end of the 20th Century, which left the temperatures in the latter part of the 20th Century, as inferred from the tree ring data, well below those of the 1930s!  The full Briffa tree ring data set is shown below in red, while the portion used as input for the UN IPCC reports is shown in black.

There are a number of interesting things to note here about this data.  We know that the late 20th Century was not so much colder than the 1930s as this implies.  Another is that the late 20th Century shows a dip in temperatures severe enough to imply that it was as cold as most of the latter part of the Little Ice Age.  Well, we know that is not true.  This data would also imply that early in the period of temperature decline into the Little Ice Age, it was still warmer than in a few decades of the late 20th Century, which would be consistent with the slightly earlier MWP having been warmer, a fact the AGW scientists wanted to suppress.   

But the bottom line here is that the tree ring proxy data appears clearly to be unreliable.  The correlation of the tree rings with known temperature data in the late 20th Century is clearly wrong, even though we know the instrumental land data to have been bumped upward artificially, we do know the temperatures really were warmer than those from the tree ring data.  There are many factors that affect tree ring growth in addition to temperature, including sunlight available to the tree, which may be shaded by other trees, soil quality, water supply, and disease or bug attacks.  Yet this data was a cornerstone piece of evidence for AGW, along with other discredited bristlecone data by Mann.

The trick used to hide this Briffa tree ring problem in the recent 20th Century, which anyone could see was both wrong and inconsistent with the AGW claims, was to terminate the use of the tree ring data set in 1960 and splice in the instrumental temperature record from that time on.  Thus, the AGWs could use a tree ring data set that rather flattened the whole temperature record from 1400 to 1960, which had a good low temperature at the end of that series, and could have the stretched out, tampered with land instrumental temperature record added on from that time on.   This created wonderful hockey stick data such as that used in the UN IPCC reports.  The data from the UN IPCC report of 2001 is shown below.

Whereas the Briffa tree ring temperature proxy data set showed a dip in temperatures after the 1930s that is as much as 0.5 degree Centigrade cooler, this UN IPCC data set shows a dip in the second half of the 20th Century which is a small fraction of that and it is followed by a steep rise to temperatures which have not been matched in the last thousand years.  WELL, this is all complete NONSENSE.  This is a huge scientific FRAUD.  Note the names cited for the temperature curves used in this UN IPCC figure.  They are Mann, Jones (head of CRU), and Briffa, all co-conspirators in the catastrophic AGW scandal.

I have earlier discussed other problems relating to the Briffa proxy temperature data sets revealed by Steve McIntyre relating to the Yamal tree ring data from Siberia.  Steve McIntyre had much earlier been able to obtain enough of Michael Mann's data to figure out how it had been used to generate false hockey stick temperature data.

Note that the instrumental land temperature record goes back to 1881, but these scientists preferred to use the tree ring data up to 1960, rather than splicing in the instrumental data back in 1881, or anytime earlier in the 20th Century.  The tree ring data interpretation gave them lots of room to get the results they wanted or maybe it just happened to give them the result they wanted.  If the instrumental record had offered as low a baseline or stick for their hockey stick, they would no doubt have spliced it in earlier at some advantageous time.  As I noted earlier, the recent release of CRU documents has also made the very sorry state of the documentation of the original data sets and the adjustments made on them over the years at CRU impossible to reconstruct.  The unscientific and sorry state of this data made it impossible for CRU to release this data to Freedom of Information Act requests without huge embarrassment.   Their own scientists could not reconstruct results scientists at CRU had published earlier.  The released documents clearly show scientists pulling their hair out and going stark raving mad trying to deal with the mess.  This being the case, destroying the data, as Jones threatened to do, would have appeared to be the best thing to do!

This conspiracy of scientists claiming catastrophic AGW turned climate science from a little funded scientific backwater into a field funded with literally billions of dollars.  It made the few scientists deep in the conspiracy very famous and made them heads of various research centers.  It was a very successful fraud for a surprisingly long time.  But, the fraud was doomed to be revealed.  Because this research had many public policy implications worldwide, it was certain to attract the attention of other scientists and even historians who knew something of the past.  More and more, these scientists, just as I did, saw that some very bad science was being done and rewarded heavily by governments looking for another crisis to justify their exercise of more power over the People and to do so worldwide.

Frankly, the claims were fairly obviously bogus and could be readily seen as such by anyone with a reasonable knowledge of history and with a scientifically trained mind.  This being the case, we should judge very harshly those scientists who have not spoken out against this fraud, as well as those government bureaucrats in agencies such as NASA, NOAA, EPA, and the State Department here in the US who have been involved with the assessment of AGW issues, and the politicians who have advocated taking drastic actions to curtail and tax the use of cheap and reliable fossil fuel energy without getting good scientific advice.  In fact, many of these people were very vociferous advocates that the science was decided and any doubters were foos and even traitors.

I am going to call out the two universities I studied at in particular for having disappointed me by not having a single scientist who argued against this AGW fraud publicly.  In fact, both Case Western Reserve University and Brown University promoted the AGW fraud as politically correct on campus and in the school newspapers and the alumni magazines.  Shame on you, Brown University and Case Western Reserve University!  As in so many other issues, you have both made your bias toward socialism obvious by favoring its appetite over reality.

I also believe that those major companies that jumped on the AGW and alternative energy subsidy bandwagon should be scolded severely.  Among these companies are GE, GM, Ford, Exxon Mobil, Shell Oil, and many others who have been claiming to be reducing CO2 emissions in order to save the Earth from a man-made greenhouse gas-induced warming catastrophe.  They had a civic duty to declare AGW nonsense and not to seek subsidies and other benefits from the AGW frenzy.

CRU Data Files Undocumented and Baffle CRU Programmers

Go here and read about how mysterious the data files at CRU, upon which AGW theory rests, were to one HARRY who had to work on the data in the post 1995 period.  It is amazing how undocumented and crazily handled the critical data files for the climate modeling programs were.  It is clear no one can now make any sense out of them.  HARRY tried and tried and then gave up totally on the pre-1995 data.

Examples of HARRY's exasperation:

So.. we don't have the coefficients files (just .eps plots of something). But
what are all those monthly files? DON'T KNOW, UNDOCUMENTED. Wherever I look,
there are data files, no info about what they are other than their names. And
that's useless.. take the above example, the filenames in the _mon and _ann
directories are identical, but the contents are not. And the only difference
is that one directory is apparently 'monthly' and the other 'annual' - yet
both contain monthly files.

Edit: have just located a 'cld' directory in Mark New's disk, containing
over 2000 files. Most however are binary and undocumented..

The conclusion of a lot of investigation is that the synthetic cloud grids
for 1901-1995 have now been discarded. This means that the cloud data prior
to 1996 are static.

For 1901 to 1995 - stay with published data. No clear way to replicate
process as undocumented.

For 1996 to 2002:
...
This should approximate the correction needed.

These are very promising. The vast majority in both cases are within 0.5
degrees of the published data. However, there are still plenty of values
more than a degree out.

TMP has a comforting 95%+ within half a degree, though one still wonders
why it isn't 100% spot on..

..knowing how long it takes to debug this suite - the experiment
endeth here. The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally
undocumented so we'll never know what we lost.

22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software
suites - let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the
definitive failure of the entire project..

And on and on go HARRY's struggles to reproduce the results of the UN IPCC reports and various peer-reviewed publications upon which they were based.  It proves a futile effort.  This is the data upon which Obama and the Democrat Congress and our EPA base their claim that we are are in danger of destroying the Earth due to our CO2 emissions.  Therefore, we have make drastic cutbacks in fossil fuel use.  Therefore, we must put coal workers out of work.  Therefore, we must destroy our electric power system since half of our electricity is produced from coal.  Therefore we must drive small and unsafe cars.  Therefore homes and businesses must pay twice as much for future electricity use, when it is available.  It will in fact be erratically supplied at best.  Many states already have restrictions on coal-fired power plant electricity.

I would not buy a used car from these fools who have relied upon the Mann and Briffa data and the computer models of CRU and the UN for their assessments of catastrophic man-made global warming.  It is clear that Obama and these Democrats are part of the basis for this fraud.  The Democrats and their environmentalist allies have long demanded that these frauds be funded and they have supplied them with federal government monies to perform much of this "research."  The American People should be disgusted with this combination of gullible and/or shyster socialists who were allies with some very dishonest "scientists" to put this huge fraud over on the American People, not to mention all the other peoples of the Earth.

The discovery or proof of this fraud should make all Americans very, very dubious about anything that Obama and the Democrat leadership says.  I believe they were more participants than duped, but whichever is more true, their judgment is completely discredited.  It is also completely discredited on the health care issues, job creation, and on union promotion issues as other examples.  It is nearly to the point that if the Democrats say anything, the American people should assume it is wrong.

The Hockey Stick Data in the 2007 UN IPCC Report

One of the two principal arguments used to justify the claim that the global temperature increase of the late 20th Century was due to man's emissions of CO2, is a number of sets of hockey stick data derived from tree ring type studies.  Among the data sets was the already thoroughly discredited Mann hockey stick data which showed a land surface temperature record in which the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age were of muted scale and were followed by a huge increase suddenly in the late 20th Century.  With much fanfare, the Mann hockey stick data was withdrawn from the Summary Report of the 2007 report because Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit discovered the serious statistic errors that gave rise to the artifice hockey stick.  In addition to that hockey stick data, there are a number of other surface temperature records based on tree growth which are also hockey stick data sets.  These data sets are all in use in the heart of the report as part of the argument that solar activity cannot explain the unique, suddenly increasing temperatures of the late 20th Century, so the cause must be man's emissions of carbon dioxide.

Recently, Steve McIntyre has found that there are severe problems with the temperature record in the Yamal Tree Ring Cores from Siberia used by Briffa.  The global warming alarmists have long claimed that the temperature increase in Siberia was especially large and that this is what you would expect given increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.  It turns out that the Yamal data set plays an especially important role in the surface temperature record, just as the Mann data set still does.  More on that later.  The entire tree core set for the Yamal data set is 10 cores in 1990 and 5 cores in 1995.  Much larger core sets exist, such as the Polar Urals core set, and that set shows the Medieval Warming Period to be as warm as the late 20th Century warming.  But, the 2007 UN IPCC report ignores these other data sets.

Steve McIntyre examined the larger Schweingruber Khadyta River tree core data set from Siberia and compared it to the Yamal data set used by the UN IPCC report and which is in the East Anglia Climate Research Unit archive.  He tried very hard for a long time to get access to the Yamal data set, as did others.  This East Anglia CRU group is that same one which is both the world's primary keeper of the land surface temperature records and the has a history of denying others access to the data.  They also were recently found to have lost the original data in many cases and to have only retained highly modified data.  The result of McIntyre's analysis is plotted below.

The hockey stick sudden rise in temperature at the end of the 20th Century has disappeared.  It was an artifact of the very small core data set given such prominence by CRU and the UN IPCC.  It was a huge mistake.  To see how huge a mistake, we must go into this a bit deeper.

Steve McIntyre says that the IPCC AR4 (2007) said that the late 20th Century was the warmest period in 1300 years based on 10 tree growth data sets including the Mann Hockey Stick data and reconstructions of the surface temperature record by a relatively small group of authors.  9 of the 10 tree histories go back to the Medieval Warm Period, that same period a number of global warming alarmists have said they need to eliminate.  The plot of these surface temperature histories is given below.

The Mann hockey stick data and the Yamal data set give the most pronounced hockey stick results of these 10 data sets, but the other data sets are nonetheless also hockey stick temperature records, so maybe the UN IPCC conclusions are still right?  Well, no they are not.  The reason is that almost all of these data sets are dependent upon the Mann and/or the Yamal data sets being right.  Again, this is a point that McIntyre has been making for a long time, but could not really clearly demonstrate until he was able to get the Yamal data.

McIntyre says:

You will frequently see apologists state that these reconstructions provide "independent" evidence. However, this is not the case on two counts. The same proxies [procedure to convert observed core characteristics into temperatures] are used over and over again - a point reported at CA [Climate Audit] on many occasions and confirmed in Wegman et al 2006. Thus, if problems arise with (say) bristlecones or (say) Yamal, this will affect multiple studies and not be contained to one result. More on this below. In addition, there are not really 10 "independent" groups, as "independence" is understood in the real world. Mann and Jones 2003 is not independent of Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) or Jones (Briffa) et al 1998 or Rutherford et al 2005 (Mann, Osborn, Bradley, Briffa, Hughes and Jones).

 The other point - which I will state here but not prove - is a point about reconstruction methodologies. It is well known in the statistical climate blogs (CA, Jeff Id, David Stockwell, Lubos) that typical paleoclimate operations applied to red noise will yield HS [Hockey Stick] patterns - a line of argument that Ross and I discussed in detail in connection with MBH PC methods, but the same problem arises when you cherry pick from red noise or do ex post correlation weighting. To my knowledge, the climate "community" is in denial on this issue. There is a corollary to this "theorem" - a point that we discussed in our Reply to von Storch and Zorita, which is very important, but which hasn't got as much attention. If you manually include a huge HS-shaped series in a bunch of red noise and apply standard paleoclimate methods to the network - CPS, as well as Mannian PCs - you get an enhanced HS back with a a minor amount of static.

Rather than paleoclimate methods being "robust" as they self-proclaim, they are profoundly non-robust as this term is used in statistics - denoting the lack of stability of results to individual series. There are two series that play a particular role in the current spaghetti graph population: strip-bark bristlecones/foxtails (especially as Mann's PC1) and Briffa's Yamal (and its predecessor).....

In summary, the apparent problems with Briffa's Yamal series impact multiple other studies:
Briffa 2000, Mann and Jones 2003 (used in the recent UNEP graphic), Mann et al (EOS 2003), Jones and Mann 2004, Osborn and Briffa 2006, D'Arrigo et al 2006, Hegerl et al 2007, Kaufman et al 2009 (and of course, Briffa et al 2008).

Once again we find that a key part of the land surface temperature history used by the man-made global warming alarmists to make their case is unreliable and indeed wrong.

Elsewhere at Climate Audit, Finnish Professor Atte Korhola is quoted, in translation, as saying

I put immediately forward a thesis that I'm glad to expose to public criticism: when later generations learn about climate science, they will classify the beginning of 21st century as an embarrassing chapter in history of science. They will wonder our time, and use it as a warning of how the core values and criteria of science were allowed little by little to be forgotten as the actual research topic — climate change — turned into a political and social playground.

Another example is a study recently published in the prestigious journal Science. It is concluded in the article that the average temperatures in the Arctic region are much higher now than at any time in the past two thousand years. The result may well be true, but the way the researchers ended up with this conclusion raises questions. Proxies have been included selectively, they have been digested, manipulated, filtered, and combined, for example, data collected from Finland in the past by my own colleagues has even been turned upside down such that the warm periods become cold and vice versa. Normally, this would be considered as a scientific forgery, which has serious consequences.

Patrick Michaels: The Dog Ate Global Warming

The title of Patrick J. Michaels' article is so good, I had to mention it here, even though I have already written on this subject on 19 August 2009 in an entry called Global Surface Temperature Data Lost.  The Dog Ate Global Warming is a very interesting account of the efforts of many scientists to get the original surface temperature data from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, which was originally funded by the U.S. Dept. of Energy and has received funds from the EPA as well.  Michaels also has knowledge of the foolishness of the CRU claim that they could not keep the data because they did not have enough data storage capacity in the 1980s.  His account is quite entertaining.  He concludes that this episode of shoddy science casts even more doubt on the claims of the global warming alarmists who are pushing the EPA to claim CO2 is a pollutant, with the consequence that the government will be forcing huge increases in energy costs, a reduction in power reliability, and massive increases in unemployment.

Yes, the Dog ate the primary data basis for the claim of catastrophic man-made global warming!  So, what are the consequences?  Our intrepid friend at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has come up with a great response.  CEI's general counsel, Sam Kazman, has had CEI file a petition to force the EPA to reopen a major global warming proceeding.  This account finishes with:

CEI’s petition, filed late Monday with EPA, argues that CRU’s disclosure casts a new cloud of doubt on the science behind EPA’s proposal to regulate carbon dioxide.  EPA stopped accepting public comments in late June but has not yet issued its final decision.  As CEI’s petition argues, court rulings make it clear that agencies must consider new facts when those facts change the underlying issues.

CEI general counsel Sam Kazman stated, “EPA is resting its case on international studies that in turn relied on CRU data.  But CRU’s suspicious destruction of its original data, disclosed at this late date, makes that information totally unreliable.  If EPA doesn’t reexamine the implications of this, it’s stumbling blindly into the most important regulatory issue we face.”

You may recall that Sam Kazman filed the Freedom of Information Act request for the Alan Carlin and John Davidson report from within the EPA which questioned the EPA's evidence that CO2 was a pollutant.  This report was suppressed by the EPA management.  I discussed this in an entry called EPA Suppression of Endangerment Analysis of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on 1 July 2009.

Global Surface Temperature Data Lost

NASA has a surface temperature data set maintained by James Hanson's GISS, but it tends to be loaded with readings which are thought by many critics to be too high and it has been caught in some serious mistakes. The most commonly cited surface temperature data set is maintained by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia, Great Britain. For years scientists have requested the raw data to check to see if such adjustments made to it for urban heat island effects and grid averages are valid. The CRU has refused to make the data available, despite its being public data collected with government monies. Now, in response to a determined Freedom of Information Act request, Prof. Phil Jones, an activist-scientist, who controls the data says that the raw data no longer exists.

So, most of the developed countries of the world are restricting the use of economical fossil fuels and paying huge subsidies for alternative, non-competitive energy sources, based on a cock-a-Mamie theory of catastrophic man-made global warming which is based mostly on the surface temperature data sets of CRU and NASA, neither of which can be relied upon. These data sets have long indicated more global warming in the late 20th Century than did satellite measurements or many buoys measuring the ocean water temperatures. Temperature data sets of the entire atmosphere and the oceans that cover 70% of the Earth's surface have been largely ignored in favor of the land surface measurements which are most likely to be affected by artifacts such as the urban heat island effects. This makes no scientific sense, but it does fulfill the agenda of socialist political goals.

Another reason to worry about the quality of the surface temperature data sets is that over the last 20 - 30 years, 5000 of the world's 6,000 weather stations have been abandoned or ignored. Despite the huge increases in climate research monies, these have not been replaced or upgraded with modern technology. Many of the abandoned stations are in more remote areas where it is important to have high quality surface temperature measurements. Of course, those remote area measurements are subject to less data manipulation, so if one has an agenda that causes one to want exaggerated global warming, it is easier to get that from surface temperature measurements made near cities or towns with heat island effects.