Comment by Anthony Watts:

This interview below by Tom Minchin took place in a hospital staff room just a few minutes before my presentation in Hamilton City, Victoria at the hospital auditorium. Tom did a much better job than most reporters because not only did he ask useful questions, he recorded it and wrote from that, rather than just taking notebook scribbles that invariably end up in misquotes and misinterpretations.

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“Noble Cause Corruption”

Climate science depends utterly on the integrity of its measurements. In order to extrapolate and make forecasts, there can be no errors in the data. How reliable are the measurements climate scientists use? What happens if their measuring apparatus is altered by something as simple as a coat of paint that lifts the average recordings? Will anyone spot it? And if someone does, what happens if such a desired result matters more than getting the facts straight?

An expert on these questions, Anthony Watts, founder of the most widely visited climate site in the world, the US-based Watts Up With That, (47.3 million hits since the fall of 2007, compared with the leading alarmist site RealClimate’s 11.7 million since December 2004), is wrapping up his national tour at the moment and I spoke to him in Melbourne.

At the start of the interview, Watts, a former TV weatherman, confirmed that he did not begin as a skeptic. As he put it himself with typical bluntness, “I started out actually just being a climate alarmist. I got involved with saving the planet by helping other weather forecasters do the same thing through planting trees. Then when I met the State climatologist in California, his data changed my mind and now I’m a skeptic.”

Watts was not content to let his view rest on someone else’s data. He researched the matter in a wholly original way. Talking to him it became clear just how plain honesty and an inquiring mind are fatal to the alarmist cause. His alertness to measurement problems began well before his skepticism.

When I was in college one of the first jobs I had was to assemble a Stevenson Screen [the slatted box on stilts that protects meteorological instruments from undue influences, widely used up until 1984], and I remember the whitewash coming off in my hand. I’d always wondered about that. My professor told me we couldn’t change it because even though it was an inferior coating that flaked off, it just couldn’t be changed. Then when I learned in 1979 that the Weather Bureau had changed the specification to latex I wondered if that made a difference - and there didn’t seem to be anything in the literature about it. And so as I’d often wondered about it, I finally got around to doing the experiment, and when I did the experiment I discovered that there was indeed a difference, a significant difference [a thermometer in a latex painted screen records a higher average temperature], which was as large as the agreed upon global warming signal. So that sparked my interest. And then when I went to visit screens to test the paint issue, I discovered stations were poorly sited. And so that grew into a larger situation.

It is interesting to see how an active mind makes connections. From a simple concern about flaking whitewash and a response to it by a professor who knows that a standard must be kept constant, a thinker can make the choices to become a global leader in exposing climate fraud and distortion. He continued:

Initially the screens were probably in the right locations, because when a lot of these stations were started there was less urbanization. There was more open space and thus there were more choices available to place them in an open space. However, urbanization built up around a lot of these thermometers. Then when the observer may have died - some of the observers were volunteer observers, some of them were at organizations - or organizations closed, or some other reason would cause them to have to be moved, then there were less available places away from urbanization to move them to. And so gradually there became less and less space to put these things in - or urbanization grew up around them. So that’s the key problem here: how much has the urbanization affected the signal?

I asked him if his conclusion was that the signal was being distorted and thus that “the temperature record was unreliable.” His answer was unequivocal:

Right. The specification from the United States NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and through their weather service, NWS - National Weather Service - has a simple rule called the 100 foot rule. And it basically says keep the thermometers away from influences such as concrete, asphalt, car parks, buildings, other heat generating phenomena - keep them away at least 100 feet. Our study in the United States showed that only one in ten met that rule.

So politicians are demanding unprecedented control over our lives based on only one in ten US measuring stations meeting minimum standards.

I asked him how he thinks the fight is going and about his website that is such a pivotal part of that fight. Forty-seven million hits since the fall of 2007 is an impressive number. How does he account for that level of interest?

I think it’s because we’re discussing things other people are not. We have research that’s original, we have a lot of highly skilled people that visit there, and we try to maintain decorum. One of the things that I don’t have tolerance for is flame wars and trolls and all these sorts of things. You know, if were going to have a discussion I want it to be reasonable and I want everyone to be able to participate. People that try to ‘dominate discussions and so forth, I let them know they’re doing it wrong and I give time outs from time to time and things of that nature. I enforce rules to maintain order and I think that’s attractive to a lot of people.

I asked him if he was optimistic about the growth of skepticism. Does he think there is a rising tide?

I do. The Climategate e-mails made a huge impact and they demonstrated a lot of the things that skeptics have been saying for years: that the scientists were actively sequestering data, not making it available when asked, and that they were treating people with genuine, reasonable questions like Steve McIntyre as people to be fought against. They were doing political science, not true physical science.

I asked him what he thinks the chances are of cap-and-trade passing in the United States Senate this year:

Right now about 20 votes short of being passed. I don’t think it will pass this year. However it may pass in the future. The reason I don’t think it will pass this year is because we’re coming up on a November election. The Democratic people know that they’re under the gun, that there’s a lot of dissent amongst the voters and that a lot of that anger is directed towards them and so I don’t think they’re going to do anything that’s going to increase fuel taxes at this juncture. However, that being said they’re very patient people and so I expect it to be back in one form or another even if it doesn’t pass this year.

So the fight is very much alive. What drives it all? If politicians blindly pursue their agendas in order to look hip and increase their power, it’s one thing. But I asked how climate professionals can excuse themselves and what he meant by a term he used to me: “Noble Cause Corruption.” The term was originally a legal one. Its legal meaning is well explained by Steve Rothlein as follows:

There exists a serious threat to law enforcement, which can compromise the high ethical standards and values our profession has achieved during the past several decades. This threat is typically referred to as “Noble Cause Corruption.”

Traditional corruption is defined as the use of one’s official position for personal gain. The personal gain can be economic or otherwise, such as sexual favors. As a profession, we have long understood this type of abuse of power and, when discovered and investigated, those involved are arrested.

A less obvious but perhaps even more threatening type of misconduct in law enforcement is Noble Cause Corruption. This type of misconduct involves not necessarily the rotten apples in the agency but sometimes involves the best officers in the agency, or the golden apples. Noble Cause Corruption is a mindset or sub-culture which fosters a belief that the ends justify the means. In other words, law enforcement is engaged in a mission to make our streets and communities safe, and if that requires suspending the Constitution or violating laws ourselves in order to accomplish our mission, then for the greater good of society, so be it. The officers who adopt this philosophy lose their moral compass.

You can see why the term was adopted by Watts’ friend Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit. It is one Watts clearly likes. I asked him what he meant by it in the climate context. He replied:

Noble Cause Corruption is a belief that what you’re doing is so much more important than what anyone else is doing because your cause is noble, you’re saving the planet, and because you’re saving the planet, you are doing it for the good of mankind. Therefore your cause is much more important than everyone else’s. There was a time when I actually felt that way, when I was doing a project related to planting trees, and having TV meteorologists plant trees back around 1990. It’s easy to get caught up in that Noble Cause Corruption because it makes you feel good. It makes you feel important. It makes you feel powerful. And so all of those things combine to put a blinder on you as to what you’re really doing.

Finally, I asked him what he would advise people to do if they want to push this debate towards a more open and scientific basis, away from the “true believers.” He answered by defining the conflict:

I would say this boils down to a war between the haves and the have-nots. The haves are the people that are getting all the funding. They’re getting millions and millions of dollars of funding. The skeptics, we get scraps, we do things on our own. I funded most of the project on my own. And so who should you trust? People that are being paid for an opinion, paid for an output, versus someone who is not being paid for an output, and I think that’s the question.

When those getting the funding are riddled with “Noble Cause Corruption” his point is unarguable.

His final recommendation was never to let an opportunity pass to engage:

I think that if you want skeptics to have an even keel in the debate, skeptics need to push their position more often and that means writing more letters to the editor, to newspapers, to magazines and trade journals and to scientific journals. And, when there are people on the radio that are claiming things that are patently absurd, someone should be phoning in and calling them on it and not giving them a free pass.

There will be a lot fewer free passes if Watts’ growing success has anything to do with it. See post here.

The planet Venus has entered the carbon dioxide (CO2)/ global warming discussion because its atmosphere is 96.5% (965,000 ppm.) CO2 and its surface temperature is higher than that of Mercury which is closer to the Sun. Since radiant energy varies inversely as the square of the distance (S) traveled from its source (E~1/S2) and Mercury’s distance from the Sun is about 1/2 that of Venus, Mercury should be exposed to 4 times the Solar energy that Venus is and should experience markedly higher surface temperatures than Venus. Venus is also about 2/3 the distance from the Sun as the Earth is. Using that same relationship “E~1/S2”, the surface temperature of Venus would be expected to be about 2.25 times that of the Earth. However, the average temperature of Venus’s surface is actually about 20 times that of the Earth’s surface.

E = 1/S squared

For Venus/Mercury E = 1/(1/2)2 = 1/(1/4) = 4/1 = 4
For Earth/ Venus E = 1/(2/3)2 = 1/(4/9) = 9/4 = 2.25

These factors have been combined to infer that Venusian “runaway” global warming is primarily induced by the high concentration of CO2 in its atmosphere. This paper is intended to focus on isolated aspects of CO2’s contribution to Venus’s global warming and to thereby promote a discussion of its true influence on Venus’s global temperature.

A detailed analysis of the venusian atmosphere is conducted with results from the Magellan and Venus Explorer probes.

CONCLUSION

Venus is the hottest planet in the Solar system. Venus is hotter than Mercury which is 1/2 of it’s distance from the Sun. Venus’s atmosphere has 93 times the total mass of the Earth’s atmosphere and is 97.7 mass% CO2. The total mass of CO2 in Venus’s atmosphere is 152,451 times the total mass of CO2 found in the Earth’s atmosphere and the mass fraction of CO2 in Venus’s atmosphere is 1,639 times its mass fraction in Earth’s atmosphere. These facts have led to the generally accepted conclusion that CO2 has caused “run away” global warming of Venus and its atmosphere. This conclusion been extrapolated to reenforce the notion of CO2 induced global warming on Earth.

The preceding simple “thought experiment” was designed to explore some possible thermal consequences of an Earth equivalent (in composition) atmosphere on Venus (AIRv) at a pressure equal to Earth’s sea level atmospheric pressure. The results of this “experiment” illustrate that such an atmosphere on Venus would most likely have the same temperature (69 C) as was measured in Venus’s atmosphere at Earth’s sea level pressure by the Magellan and Venus Explorer space probes.

A table of Venusian atmospheric altitude, temperature and pressure data that was collected by the Magellan and Venus Express space probes was used to construct a graph (Fig. 1) depicting the (reverse) temperature lapse rate for the Venusian atmosphere from an altitude of 60 km down to it’s surface. That graph was a straight line, with no deviations, indicating that there were no layers within Venusʼ atmosphere that had trapped and stored reradiated heat.

This study, though hypothetical in nature, tends to question the role of CO2 in the “run away” global warming of Venus and it’s CO2 rich atmosphere. It also tends to minimize the notion of CO2 acting as a green house gas in general.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Other factors, such as axial tilt, sidereal rotation period, large variations in wind velocities, etc. can potentially effect the temperature of Venus and it’s atmosphere. However, the intention of this paper is to totally focus on CO2 and it’s contribution to the temperature of Venus and it’s atmosphere. J.K.

UPDATE: See this analysis of heat wave days and death trends for 40 major cities. It shows both declining for the periods 1975 - 2004 from 1975 - 1995 here. See further comments after post below.

NEW YORK (AP)—Hot town, summer in the city? No kidding.

The high temperatures blanketing the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions of the country are making many people miserable, but those in New York City, Philadelphia and other dense, built-up areas are getting hit with the heat in a way their counterparts in suburbs and rural areas aren’t.

Cities absorb more solar energy during the day and are slower to release it after the sun sets, making for uncomfortable nights and no real relief from the heat. And because they haven’t cooled down as much overnight, mornings are warmer and the thermometer goes right back up when the sun starts beating down the next day.

Scientists have known for years about so-called heat islands, urban areas that are hotter than the less-developed areas around them. Cities are just “not well designed to release that summertime heat,” said William Solecki, geography professor at Hunter College and director of the City University of New York’s Institute for Sustainable Cities.

The lack of nighttime relief can make the daytime high temperatures even more difficult for people to take as the days pass and the heat continues, he said.

That’s “where you start to have real problems, if your body’s not cooling down,” Solecki said. “You’re not getting that break.”

Deaths blamed on the heat included a 92-year-old Philadelphia woman whose body was found Monday and a homeless woman found lying next to a car Sunday in suburban Detroit.

The heat-islands effect is significant in the East because “we have a large population living in heavily built-up areas with lots of concrete and lots of steel, good absorbers of heat,” National Weather Service spokesman Sean Potter said.

And there’s nothing like the extreme heat of the past couple of days to make it obvious to everyone.

On Tuesday, the temperature hit 103 degrees in New York City and 102 in Philadelphia, soared past the century mark in Boston, Washington, D.C., and Newark, N.J., and broke records in Providence, R.I., and Hartford, Conn.

The heat-island effect occurs because cities, with their numerous building surfaces and paved roads, absorb more of the solar energy coming from the sun during the day than places that are less built up. At night, those types of surfaces don’t release that accumulated energy as quickly.

Cities also are very dry places, due to the lack of greenery and vegetation that could help bring moisture into the area and keep temperatures down, said Stuart Gaffin, an associate research scientist at Columbia University who focuses on urban climatology and environment.

All that combines to make cities risker places for people during times of extreme heat, he said. “For me,” Gaffin said, “this is the scariest kind of weather.”

Read more here.

The heat was concentrated in the coastal plain and urban areas near the coast and enhanced by downslope compressional warming. Usually the 100F days for the big cities of the northeast come with a northwest wind coming downslope from the higher elevations. This adds 5F or so to the temperature. urban heat islands hold the heat at night. NOAA (thanks to Tom Peterson) and CRU (thanks to Phil Jones and David Parker) denied the contamination effect of urban heat island (UHI) and make no corrections for UHI in their data bases. NOAA USHCN version 1 had such a correction when first implemented in 1990 based on work by Tom Karl (1988). They removed it in version 2 in 2007. NASA GISS to their credit does an urbanization assessment but its corrrective effect is offset by homogenization in the United States and bad metadata globally. They utilize night lights in North America to determine urban, suburban and rural. Globally they had used population but McIntyre showed, their metadata that was used to determine urban vs rural was so bad, they adjusted urban areas warmer as often as cooler. They are moving to night lights globally but the homogenization factor still remains an issue. See more here.

Why we continue to waste our precious research dollars on these useless models is beyond me.  Basing policy on them is sheer folly.

"Move along now, please… Nothing to see here...” was the predictable burden of Sir Muir Russell’s investigation into Climategate. Are we surprised? Any other conclusion would have made world headlines as a first for the climate change establishment. This is the third Climategate whitewash job and it would be tempting to see it as just as futile as its predecessors. That, however, would be to underrate its value to the sceptic cause, which is considerable.

This is because Russell’s “Not Guilty” verdict has been seized upon as an excuse to reinstate Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia CRU, this time as Director of Research. That is very good news. It spells out to the world that the climate clique looks after its own; that there is no more a culture of accountability and job forfeiture for controversial conduct in AGW circles than there is in parliamentary ones; that it is business as usual for Phil and his merry men. Or, to put it more bluntly, the brand remains toxic.

Apart from Michael “Hockeystick” Mann, there is no name more calculated to provoke cynical smiles in every inhabited quarter of the globe than that of Phil Jones. The dogs in the street in Ulan Bator know that he and his cronies defied FOI requests and asked for e-mails to be deleted and that people only do that if they have something to hide. Every time some UN-compliant government or carbon trading interest group tries to scare the populace witless with scorched-earth predictions of imminent climate disaster and cites research from the East Anglia CRU - of which Phil Jones is Director of Research - it will provoke instant scepticism.

As I pointed out earlier this week, the AGW lobby has recently shown signs of belatedly getting its PR act together, of assuming a false humility, of being less dogmatic, in an effort to win round public opinion. It is an attempt to turn over a new leaf - on the Dave Cameron model, to detoxify the brand. It is, of course, a ploy to recover lost credibility and impose upon the public more effectively. Putting Phil Jones back at the centre of the picture completely wrecks that rehabilitation scheme. It is as if Dave appointed Lady Thatcher to oversee his “compassionate Conservatism” agenda.

The problem for the more sophisticated warmist propagandists is that, on this occasion, the attempt to construct a Cameron-style “modernised” climate scare party collided with the primeval instinct of the British academic and public-sector establishment to protect its own. It shares with the Spanish Legion the principle of never abandoning its wounded. None of our boys will ever be taken out by the sceptics, is the rule, no matter how badly they goof up.

So, this is an important and encouraging development for everybody dedicated to blowing the AGW scam out of the water. It means one of the principal pillars of the IPCC that might have been cosmetically repaired now remains irretrievably compromised. The next few years will be critical for the survival of the AGW superstition: it is now, partly due to Climategate and partly to the global recession, fighting for survival. This latest blunder significantly lessens its prospects of pulling through. A big thank you to Professor Edward Acton and the climate establishment at the University of East Anglia and elsewhere, without whose purblind sense of entitlement the eventual overthrow of this false orthodoxy might not have been possible.

See post here.

The University of East Anglia’s enquiry into the conduct of its own staff at its Climatic Research Unit has highlighted criticisms of the department and staff conduct - but clears the path for the individuals concerned to carry on.

The CRU played an important role in writing the UN’s IPCC summaries on climate science, so the issue is far from a parochial one. The most serious charge is poor communication; Sir Muir Russell even calls for “a concerted and sustained campaign to win hearts and minds” to restore confidence in the team’s work.

Russell was appointed by the institution to investigate an archive of source code and emails that leaked onto the internet last November. The source code is not addressed at all. His report suggests that the problems were of the academics’ own making, stating that they were “united in defence against criticism”. Yet the enquiry found that despite emails promising to “redefine” the peer review publication process, and put pressure on journal editors, staff were not guilty of subverting the IPCC process, and their “rigour” and “honesty” were beyond question.

Leading academics were called for written and oral evidence before the Russell enquiry, and in many cases the report accepts their account of events. For example, wearing their IPCC hats, the academics are cleared of excluding critical evidence, and yet bending the rules to include supporting studies. To reach this particular conclusion, for example, the report finds a criterion: a “consistence of view” with earlier work… by the academics in question.

Despite the gentlemanly and clubbable tone, the report nevertheless has deep systemic criticism of the institution and the team’s processes. UEA “fell badly short of its scientific and public obligations”, according to one review panel member, Lancet editor Richard Horton.

It criticises the team’s decision to curtail a temperature reconstruction at 1960, and splice on an instrumental temperature record, without explanation, noting:

“The figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading in not describing that one of the series was truncated post 1960 for the figure, and in not being clear on the fact that proxy and instrumental data were spliced together. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data.”

There’s a selective approach to criticism of scientific techniques - officially, Muir Russell says it doesn’t examine the validity of scientific arguments. But as you can see, in places, it does. On the issue of the Yamal reconstruction, CRU is cleared but the related issues of basing the reconstruction on a limited sample of proxies, and using techniques which exaggerate and validate outliers (basically, one tree) is not addressed.

FOIA

On compliance with Freedom of Information requests, the enquiry found the CRU team evasive, and “found a tendency to answer the wrong question or to give a partial answer”. They also found “a clear incitement to delete e-mails, although we have seen no evidence of any attempt to delete information in respect of a request already made”. (Jones had told a US academic that “I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone” and requesting deletions from other staff.)

The defensiveness “set the stage”, says Russell, for the barrage of FOIA requests last year, but “clear and early action would likely have prevented much subsequent grief”. It adds that “CRU helped create the conditions for this campaign by being unhelpful in its earlier responses”.

The institution itself had failed to anticipate the new FOIA regime, and let the academics run amok. Strangely it calls for “a concerted and sustained campaign to win hearts and minds” to restore confidence.

On information handling, the report “highlighted significant problems in the areas of: imbalance of authority; lack of effective challenge at appeal; over dependence on single individuals; inadequate escalation processes and limited strategic oversight.”

The panel avoided examining the scientific work of the CRU Team - as have the two other reviews of the leaked archive by Lord Oxburgh, and the Commons Select Committee on science. If the academics had used bats’ wings or tea leaves to create temperature reconstructions, that wasn’t a matter for any of the panels to judge. And this is undoubtedly a shortcoming. The voter is entitled to see the evidence and understand the arguments that may answer the question: “Is this climate thing anything to worry about?”

It’s worth taking a step back from the details of Climategate to understand the background to the enquiries. By understanding what the CRU academics do, we can judge how important the criticism of them may be - or not.

What did the CRU crew do?

The Climatic Research Unit is one part of the picture, an important one, but not at the heart of climate theory. They’re not physicists, and they don’t do the physics upon which competing explanations of how the climate works stand or fall, once measured against observation. So in that sense, ‘Climategate’ isn’t a ‘Climategate’ - it isn’t a Scopes Trial of the global warming theory.

But CRU does two important things that shape our understanding of the present and the past. CRU is one of a small number of bodies that calculates global temperature readings (of where we are today), and is probably the pre-eminent body that performs historical temperature reconstructions, quite literally writing or re-writing history. And its importance is magnified since the leading academics are also lead authors of the UN’s IPCC reports - the vast volumes policy makers like to cite as their scientific justification, but rarely read.

In the absence of a strong physics story, this temperature work became hotly contested. The biggest bone of contention is whether modern, post-1850 warming is anomalous. If it is, then the likelihood that we were in strange and uncharted territory is much greater. If it isn’t, then consequently, the need for “urgent political action” - involving sweeping changes to industrial policy and social policy - became weaker.

The father of modern climatology, HH Lamb, founded CRU in 1972, and the building the academics work in takes his name. When Lamb contributed to the first IPCC report in 1990 the historical temperature record looked like this (enlarged here).

Lamb’s temperature graph, featured in the first IPCC report in 1990

By 2001, it looked like this (enlarged here).

Without the error bars (grey), the Medieval Warm Period disappears Source: IPCC TAR 2001

What Climategate is largely about, then, is whether the academics were justified in making that Medieval Warm Period disappear.

Unfortunately, none of the three ‘independent’ reviews have grappled with this. The absence of anomalous warming doesn’t, as some skeptics say, make the problem go away. But it takes the issue back onto the blackboard, back into realms of the potential threats. It certainly removes much of the impetus for a sweeping and urgent political program of mitigation.

Yet in the academics’ own words, we learn that the recent burst of warming, while real, is far from unusual.

One of the leading CRU academics, Keith Briffa, wrote that:

“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter…

“For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”

In an interview in February, CRU director Phil Jones agrees that recent warming isn’t statistically significant, and is matched by previous periods in the instrumental record - such as 1860 to 1880.

The sensible end of the climate debate hinges on how much of a lasting consequence an increase in CO2 has on the climate system. Some prominent scientists who as recently as 2001 were lead authors for the IPCC don’t dispute there’s an effect, but maintain that once it’s worked itself out, the effect is small.

Proponents of large positive CO2 feedbacks have pointed to various ‘fingerprints’ which are absent, or refuse to manifest themselves. Greenhouse gas warming was supposed to create a telltale warming of the troposphere, but instrumental readings show no such evidence. More recently, they have posited that CO2 must have caused warming, but this is still trapped in the oceans. This “missing heat” has yet to be found, and in the Climategate archive we find US scientist Kevin Trenberth expressing frustration: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” adding that “we can’t definitively explain why surface temperatures have gone down in the last few years. That’s a travesty!”

For Trenberth, if we had better instruments, we’d find the heat. For skeptics, the heat might not be there.

By the mid-2000s the issue had become so politicised the academics were acting like a “priesthood”, in the words of environmental writer Fred Pearce, no friend of the skeptics. As Jones wrote in an email: “Many of us in the paleo field get requests from skeptics (mainly a guy called Steve McIntyre in Canada) asking us for series. Mike and I are not sending anything, partly because we don’t have some of the series he wants, also partly as we’ve got the data through contacts like you, but mostly because he’ll distort and misuse them.”

In a sense the CRU team are carrying the can for the physicists’ failure to do the science. See full post here.