FReepmail me to get on or off
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
Great link
Posted on 12/02/2009 11:54:04 AM PST by Ultra Sonic 007
Climate scientists are refuting claims that raw data used in critical climate change reports has been destroyed, rendering the reports and policies based on those reports unreliable.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy group, is arguing that U.S. EPA's climate policies rely on raw data that have been destroyed and are therefore unreliable. The nonprofit group -- a staunch critic of U.S. EPA's efforts to regulate greenhouse gases -- petitioned the agency last week to reopen the public comment period on its proposed "endangerment finding" because the data set had been lost (E&ENews PM, Oct. 9).
But climate scientists familiar with the data insist that the reports are based on sound science and that the data in question was altered as part of standard operating procedure to ensure consistency across reporting stations.
At issue is raw data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, including surface temperature averages from weather stations around the world. The data was used in assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reports that EPA has used in turn to formulate its climate policies.
Citing a statement on the research unit's Web site, CEI blasted the research unit for the "suspicious destruction of its original data." According to CRU's Web site, "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."
Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit, said that the vast majority of the station data was not altered at all, and the small amount that was changed was adjusted for consistency.
The research unit has deleted less than 5 percent of its original station data from its database because the stations had several discontinuities or were affected by urbanization trends, Jones said.
"When you're looking at climate data, you don't want stations that are showing urban warming trends," Jones said, "so we've taken them out." Most of the stations for which data was removed are located in areas where there were already dense monitoring networks, he added. "We rarely removed a station in a data-sparse region of the world."
Refuting CEI's claims of data-destruction, Jones said, "We haven't destroyed anything. The data is still there -- you can still get these stations from the [NOAA] National Climatic Data Center."
Tom Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that the conclusions of the IPCC reports are based on several data sets in addition to the CRU, including data from NOAA, NASA and the United Kingdom Met Office. Each of those data sets basically show identical multi-decadal trends, Karl said.
Still, CEI's general counsel Sam Kazman remains skeptical of the IPCC's conclusions. The fact that the report relies on several data sets "doesn't really answer the issue," he said.
CEI and Cato Institute senior fellow Patrick Michaels argued that the "destruction of [CRU's] raw data violates basic scientific norms regarding reproducibility, which are especially important in climatology."
Ben Santer, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, dismissed that argument. "Raw data were not secretly destroyed to avoid efforts by other scientists to replicate the CRU and Hadley Centre-based estimates of global-scale changes in near-surface temperature," he wrote in comments to the advocacy group Climate Science Watch.
Santer said CRU's major findings were replicated by other groups, including the NOAA climatic data center, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and also in Russia.
Climategate ping.
I’d say “dog catcher” would carry more moral weight than “climate scientist” these days. At least dog catchers perform a needful community service.
And no, I did not come up with that term, though I saw it here, and I think we should all use it to describe people who believe in the religion of man-made global warming.
Global Warming Climagate, Fixing the Climate Data around the Policy
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article15471.html
Here is another people might want to read.
He said, "I was too ashamed to admit that he had a PhD and was a Climate Scientist!"
WTF is this supposed to mean exactly? Consistency, as in "hide the decline"?
So, the CRU does not have a list of the subset of stations they relied on for HadCRUT3, nor does it have the original data for those specific stations, nor does it have the “corrected” data for those stations, nor does it have the correction factor numbers used to massage the original data.
With all of this, Global Warming nuts say the original data is all still there from the original sources.
That comment may be true, but it means no one can check the work or the numbers our of CRU in any way.
“Trust us.”
Your welcome :)
Unfortunately, the EPA is a loose cannon that pretty much does whatever it wants.
It will kowtow to Obama, because he’s on the same page. But it constantly undermined Bush.
I’d say that if we EVER get a President and congress that decide to cut public spending, then the EPA and the Department of Education are the places to start. Just eliminate them completely. Localities and states can run the schools, and states can regulate environmental issues. Since there is at least some competition among the states, that should keep them at least slightly honest.
We need to cut TRILLIONS in government waste at this point, if the private sector and the economy are ever going to recover.
So if you have 4 sets of data that “all show the same thing,” and one of them is caught falsifying data— the conclusion is that it doesn’t matter because they all show the same thing? Here’s an alternative explanation: they all used a similar methodology, but 3 of them haven’t been caught yet.....
hh
Since the comments in the software were all to the effect of reducing past temperatures and increasing recent ones,
we get a pretty good idea what they mean by “consistency”.
What CRU does have, to be clear, is a combined dataset after all adjustments were made to whatever stations they hand picked. And this has even been something they’ve refused to provide under the legal requests made of it over the past several years. And on top of that, their emails show they were considering deleting THIS data in some form, too.
The Global Warming crowd is strange, but then, you knew that when you saw Al Gore get a Nobel Prize.
“Climate scientists are refuting claims that raw data used in critical climate change reports has been destroyed...”
Great! Make it all public.
If the data is there release it and give a complete explanation of your methodology so other scientists can validate or disprove what you have done. That is true science. However it is obvious from the e-mails that the data was deliberately manipulated to render a foregone conclusion even when analysis showed that conclusion to be wrong. This is grasping at straws.
Yep, a consistent trend line. Some honest climate scientists were screaming about the fact that their dataset seemed to obliterate the well-known Medieval Warm Period, but most just ignored that little fact like it was no big problem.
The turn over the date. If there is nothing to hide, why the stonewalling on perfectly reasonable FOIA requests for the data?
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