Note: See summary of recent findings on blatant data manipulation and irregularities here.

By Joseph D’Aleo in Pajamas Media

As James Delingpole, in the Telegraph, noted Wednesday:

“Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages. On Tuesday, we heard via the Ria Novosti agency that the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change had probably tampered with Russian-climate data:

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations. They concluded climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations and data from stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

Paint-by-Numbers Science

Imagine a paint-by-numbers kit with 12 colors of the spectrum - from purple and blue, green to yellow, orange and red, each numbered. When you finish coloring the areas in the coloring book or canvas with the appropriate color number, you have a color painting for the fridge.

Suppose you got a version with only the number 1 and 2 colors marked. You have the colors - but what you end up with is a patchwork of two colors on a white background, with lines defining other areas. You could guess about the other colors, but the end result may not be what the original creator had in mind.

Believe it or not, this very simple analogy applies to the claims of global warming.

In the climate change map of the world, where the Earth is depicted as flat (and skeptics are called flat-earthers, naturally) and with a latitude/longitude grid as the “to be colored” areas, the purples and blues represent cold temperatures and yellows, oranges, and reds represent warm. It appears the stations chosen in Russia were those that were likely to be warmer - reds and oranges. Further, with no information on what color to use for the areas where stations were ignored, guesses were made to fill in the empty grid boxes by extrapolating only from the warmer subset of stations.

More reds and oranges.

Partners in Crime: NOAA and NASA Complicit

Russia was not the only area that underwent cherry-picking, nor is CRU the only cherry-picker. NOAA’s global climate database (GHCN) - according to CRU’s Phil Jones in the following email - mirrors the CRU data under attack:

Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center.

And NASA uses the GHCN, applying their own adjustments, as we reported in this story:

Perhaps one of the biggest issues with the global data is station dropout after 1990. Over 6000 stations were active in the mid-1990s. Just over 1000 are in use today. The stations that dropped out were mainly rural and at higher latitudes and altitudes - all cooler stations. This alone should account for part of the assessed warming. China had 100 stations in 1950, over 400 in 1960, then only 25 by 1990. This changing distribution makes any assessment of accurate change impossible.

We now know that the Russian station count dropped from 476 to 121, meaning “over 40% of Russian territory was not properly included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.”

In the IEA report, there is a chart showing CRU’s selective use of 25% of the Russian data created 0.64C more warming than was exhibited by using 100% of the raw data. Given the huge area Russia represents (11.5% of global land surface area), this significantly affects global land temperatures.

We know from the maps that NASA produces - produced using NOAA GHCN data - that Canada is largely missing. As is Greenland, the Arctic, much of Africa. Brazil. And parts of Australia. (See this post.)

To fill in these large holes, data was extrapolated from great distances away. Often the data came from lower latitude, lower elevation, and higher population centers. In addition to station dropout, the number of missing months increased by as much as tenfold in many of the remaining areas. This required filling in of data from surrounding stations, again sometimes considerable distances away from the missing location. Another opportunity for error, if not mischief.

These gaps allowed the data centers to extrapolate the data from the warm spots to the missing data grids, or to blend the warm stations with the fewer remaining cooler ones.

More reds and oranges.

There was indeed a global warming period from 1979 to 1998, thanks to the natural cycles of the oceans and sun - which had produced a similar warming from around 1920 to 1940, and a cooling from the 1940s to the late 1970s. In the adjustments made by all the data centers, they cooled off the 1930s and 1940s warm blip by adjusting land and ocean temperatures down, and elevated the late 20th century and this decade.

Even with that, a cooling trend has been observed since 2001.

They applied no correction for urban growth or spread, which can produce an artificial but very localized warming (see recent Georgia Tech release here). And in the United States, Anthony Watts - in a volunteer survey of over 1000 of the 1221 instrument stations - had found 89% were poorly or very poorly sited, using NOAA’s own criteria. This resulted in a warm bias of over 1 degree C (earlier analysis here).

A few preliminary surveys in other parts of the world indicate the U.S. is not alone.

Satellites have measured global temperatures since 1979, and have shown warming. Originally the satellites were in close agreement with the data centers’ global numbers, but gradually the data centers have diverged and are now approaching 0.5 degrees Celsius (see this post).

Given all this manipulation and cherry-picking, you should ignore the press releases that will undoubtedly be coming from NOAA (when they return from snowy, cold Copenhagen), NASA, and Hadley about how this has been among the warmest years, and how the last decade was the warmest on record.

There indeed has been man-made global warming - but it’s from the paint-by-numbers men and women at NOAA, NASA, and Hadley… and now, just like that, it’s gone. Read more here.

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Climategate: Something’s Rotten in Denmark - and East Anglia, Asheville, and New York City
By Joseph D’Aleo, Pajamas Media exclusive

The familiar phrase was spoken by Marcellus in Shakespeare’s Hamlet - first performed around 1600, at the start of the Little Ice Age. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” is the exact quote. It recognizes that fish rots from the head down, and it means that all is not well at the top of the political hierarchy. Shakespeare proved to be Nostradamus. Four centuries later - at the start of what could be a new Little Ice Age - the rotting fish is Copenhagen.

The smell in the air may be from the leftover caviar at the banquet tables, or perhaps from the exhaust of 140 private jets and 1200 limousines commissioned by the attendees when they discovered there was to be no global warming evident in Copenhagen. (In fact, the cold will deepen and give way to snow before they leave, an extension of the Gore Effect.) Note: already has come.

But the metaphorical stench comes from the well-financed bad science and bad policy, promulgated by the UN, and the complicity of the so-called world leaders, thinking of themselves as modern-day King Canutes (the Viking king of Denmark, England, and Norway - who ironically ruled during the Medieval Warm Period this very group has tried to deny). His flatterers thought his powers “so great, he could command the tides of the sea to go back.”

Unlike the warmists and the compliant media, Canute knew otherwise, and indeed the tide kept rising. Nature will do what nature always did - change.

It’s the data, stupid
If we torture the data long enough, it will confess. (Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, 1991)

The Climategate whistleblower proved what those of us dealing with data for decades know to be the case - namely, data was being manipulated. The IPCC and their supported scientists have worked to remove the pesky Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and the period emailer Tom Wigley referred to as the “warm 1940s blip,” and to pump up the recent warm cycle.

Attention has focused on the emails dealing with Michael Mann’s hockey stick and other proxy attempts, most notably those of Keith Briffa. 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,” and that he knew “...there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data.’”

As Steve McIntyre has blogged:

“Much recent attention has been paid to the email about the “trick” and the effort to “hide the decline.” Climate scientists have complained that this email has been taken “out of context.” In this case, I’m not sure that it’s in their interests that this email be placed in context because the context leads right back to the role of IPCC itself in “hiding the decline” in the Briffa reconstruction.”

In the area of data, I am more concerned about the coordinated effort to manipulate instrumental data (that was appended onto the proxy data truncated in 1960 when the trees showed a decline - the so called “divergence problem") to produce an exaggerated warming that would point to man’s influence. I will be the first to admit that man does have some climate effect - but the effect is localized. Up to half the warming since 1900 is due to land use changes and urbanization, confirmed most recently by Georgia Tech’s Brian Stone (2009), Anthony Watts (2009), Roger Pielke Sr., and many others. The rest of the warming is also man-made - but the men are at the CRU, at NOAA’s NCDC, and NASAs GISS, the grant-fed universities and computer labs.

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.

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?

Climategate has sparked a flurry of examinations of the global data sets - not only at CRU, but in nations worldwide and at the global data centers at NOAA and NASA. Though the Hadley Centre implied their data was in agreement with other data sets and thus trustworthy, the truth is other data centers are complicit in the data manipulation fraud.
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When you hear press releases from NOAA, NASA, or Hadley claiming a month, year, or decade ranks among the warmest ever recorded, keep in mind: they have tortured the data, and it has confessed. See much more in the rest of this 3 page post here. See Roger Pielke Sr’s much appreciated comments on this post here.