I hesitate posting anything here for discussion that cannot be put simply and concisely. The piece below does that on a highly important underlying contention about man-made global warming. Namely, what if the original data on which global warming rests does not exist? Or has been corrupted or lost?

Think about it: the simplest rejoinder to Dr Susan Solomon - NOAA scientist and co-chair of the IPCC who spoke in August to some four-hundred people at Denver Museum of Nature and Science - is that the best original (ie, unadjusted) temperature data does not show anomalous warming in recent decades (ie, anything inconsistent with earlier decades) requiring the explanation of human-added greenhouse gases as a cause.

Below, climatologist Patrick Michaels makes a complex case fairly simple. It Congress does not act to staunch global warming, Obama's EPA will move to regulate CO2 emissions as a pollutant. If so, then the scientific basis is subject to challenge in court.

The story summarized below carries this startling implication: the train rushing to regulate CO2 emissions may hit a wall stopping it.

What about other lines of evidence? Three decades of global satellite data do not show anomalous warming - besides, their are no equivalent measurements from decades before 1979. What else is there? There is experimental lab evidence and the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. But real world measured evidence of impact and harm? Only theory if this fundamental evidence is thrown out.

The lesson? Beware of True Believers who cannot have their evidence subjected to skeptical examination.

Below, Dr. Michaels takes the floor.

-Orson
=========================================================

Taking a bite out of climate data
23
09
2009
The Dog Ate Global Warming
Interpreting climate data can be hard enough. What if some key data have been fiddled?

By Patrick J. Michaels, National Review Online



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 Climate 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.

[CONTINUED]

t’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.

SOURCE 23 Sept 2009

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Let me re-state the skeptics argument.

The +ive temperature trend recorded by global satellites for the past 30 years is about 0.3C degrees-maybe less.

The +ive temperature trend recorded by US surface records prior to 1979 is about the same.

(US record are considered the best maintained in the world, but only measure about 5% of the planet's surface, which is why the discussion by Michaels focuses on aggregate world data.)

Since this is the case, and since CO2 is thought to have been uninfluential before World War Two, then there is no scientific basis to claim man-made CO2 is causing global temperature change, since there is no measurement of this change.

No real data = no real science to back policy actions.

Since this may well be the result, what will be the global warming Believer's reaction? Furious and rapid reconstruction of records data?

Environmental economist Ross McKitrick states:”Only by playing with data can scientists come up with the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph of global warming.”There is no real, hard evidence for ”recent unprecedent warming” claims. (SEE here.)

Here is an example.

US 20th Century Temperature, raw data plot:


Now, here is a plot showing that the data is adjusted upward in recent decades:



Which supports McKitrick's claim - you gotta "adjust the data to "prove" global warming.

Finally, here is an animated gif showing the plotted differences between 'raw' data and the adjusted result:



Ya gotta "adjust" things if you want to get alarmed over THIS "planetary emergency." How convenient.