Copenhagen Update: The Other Shoe Just Dropped--Climategate II Begins
It's a fitting event set right near the climax of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen: Russian scientists confirm suspicions that UK climate scientists have mishandled Russian temperature data, resulting in exaggerated apparent global warming trend.
As James Delingpole reports in Telegraph.co.uk, "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."
The original climategate involved thousands of emails, computer codes, and other documents leaked or hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, revealing widespread fabrication, fudging, cherry picking, massaging, suppressing, and destruction of data, and intimidation of dissenting scientists and journal editors who might consider publishing them. The culprits: a couple of dozen prominent global warming alarmist scientists around the world. The result: undermining the credibility of much of the temperature data on which the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others have relied for more than two decades.
Climategate II involves the Hadley Center for Climate Change at the British Meteorological Office in Exeter, Devon, England. The Russians have revealed that the Hadley folks "have probably tampered with Russian climate data," as Icecap reports--and, because they depend on Hadley for the Russian data, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as well.
The gist: Hadley's scientist cherry-picked data from Russian temperature monitoring stations in a manner that overrepresented urban stations (affected by urban heat island effect) and underrepresented rural, especially Siberian, stations. The consequence: a fabricated, falsely strong signal of global warming for Russia, an area large enough to greatly affect the global average estimates. Hadley's mistreatment of the data created an apparent 2.06C rise in temperature since 1860, while the full Russian raw data show 1.4C rise instead.
All the more reason why, as I suggested in an earlier blog post, there should be a moratorium on all international, national, state or provincial, and local climate-change related treaty making, legislating, and regulating until a comprehensive, independent, forensic investigation of climategate--and now climategate II--has been completed.
