Some poor schmuck(s) cut and pasted and threaded .......

How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus
Messrs. Jones and Santer were Ph.D. students of Mr. Wigley. Mr. Santer
is the same fellow who, in an email to Phil Jones on Oct. 9, 2009,
wrote that he was "very tempted" to "beat the crap" out of me at a
scientific meeting. He was angry that I published "The Dog Ate Global
Warming" in National Review, about CRU's claim that it had lost
primary warming data.

http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ZTBiMTRlMDQxNzEyMmRhZjU3Zm...
The Dog Ate Global Warming
Interpreting climate data can be hard enough. What if some key data
have been fiddled?
By Patrick J. Michaels

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface
temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have
no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a
historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this
U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate
deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify
the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some
discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened,
and they aren't talking much. And what little they are saying makes no
sense.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy,
scientists at the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia
established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world's
first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It's known in the
trade as the "Jones and Wigley" record for its authors, Phil Jones and
Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the
U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It
was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a "discernible human
influence on global climate."

Putting together such a record isn't at all easy. Weather stations
weren't really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones
were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow
into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records.
Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature.
Further, as documented by the University of Colorado's Roger Pielke
Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as
in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high
temperatures are bound to be recorded.

So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that
are required to verify models of global warming aren't the original
records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren't specific about what
was done to which station in order to produce their record, which,
according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/- 0.2°C in the 20th
century.

Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered
where that "+/-" came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early
2005, asking for the original data. Jones's response to a fellow
scientist attempting to replicate his work was, "We have 25 years or
so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you,
when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific
thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to "try and find
something wrong." The ultimate objective of science is to do things so
well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.

Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech's Peter Webster
told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw
data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a
Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having
been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his
analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he
couldn't have the data because he wasn't an "academic." So his
colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph,
asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all,
saying that there were "confidentiality" agreements regarding the data
between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre's blog
readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only
a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and
written in very vague language.

It's worth noting that McKitrick and I had published papers
demonstrating that the quality of land-based records is so poor that
the warming trend estimated since 1979 (the first year for which we
could compare those records to independent data from satellites) may
have been overestimated by 50 percent. Webster, who received the CRU
data, published studies linking changes in hurricane patterns to
warming (while others have found otherwise).

Enter the dog that ate global warming.

Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at
the University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones.
Jones responded:

Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into
existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all
stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record
should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s
meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some
sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity
issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the
value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.

The statement about "data storage" is balderdash. They got the records
from somewhere. The files went onto a computer. All of the original
data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the
mid-1980s. I had all of the world's surface barometric pressure data
on one such tape in 1979.

If we are to believe Jones's note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted
the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years
ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After
all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the
question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or
lost, and why?

All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely
that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from
its docket this fall - whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection
Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide
emissions. Unlike a law, which can't be challenged on a scientific
basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there's no science.
U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.

- Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at
the Cato Institute and author of Climate of Extremes: Global Warming
Science They Don't Want You to Know.

Much of what I have previously said about normalizing observational
data, and the "metromex" urban heat island influencing gridded climate
fields is contained above. I watched as satellite data was processed
and made available in the early to mid 80's, and it left a lot to be
desired.

But you guys doubted me.

We humbly bow at the altar of your intellectual superiority, or vocabulary,
I'm not sure.

In the meantime, I really don't give a ****. Get a life.

We can go back and examine ancient tree rings, and other "true" scientific
data and identify climate cycles that go back many century, and at times
geological eras of history. Yet, we have this small window of maybe 200
years in the recent past that we can not honestly evaluate and study the
climate. And that's because the conclusion has been reached, and all that
is left to do is find "facts and statistics" that support that conclusion.

That is outside the parameters of "science."

Steve