Much Ado About Nothing

By BJ Bjornson

The nothing in this case being the supposed destruction of the raw temperature data the "sceptics" need to disprove Climate Change. The Times of London has the helpfully misleading story:

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

. . .

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals � stored on paper and magnetic tape � were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The only problem with that story is that the second sentence is completely false and the entire thrust of the story is misleading in the extreme.

The most important point to note in all of this is that it isn't the CRU's data we're talking about. Even a dullard like me can read "The data were gathered from weather stations around the world" and guess just where all of that original data might be.

Granted, I'm cheating a little, since my own job requires analyzing other's information, and one of the first things I learned was that we don't want to keep all of the original information ourselves, and the storage of it was only part of that. It is, after all, somebody else's information. Examine it, take copies if needed, certainly note where the information was obtained and what analysis you've performed on it to come to your conclusions, but let them keep the original files. Just in case something does happen to the files, it is better they remain responsible for the originals.

So where is all of this raw temperature data gleaned from weather stations all of the world located? Well, how about trying all of those weather stations and the national organizations they report to? I know, I know, that would require real work and actual thought processes. Far too easy to instead just scream about those dastardly scientists destroying the data you probably wouldn't understand in any case. But just in case you happen to be a real "sceptic" who really wants to look at the real raw data, it really does still exist, for all the good it will do you.

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.

Not that it matters. There will always be something missing to these folks, most likely to be found between their ears.