ClimateGate’s Smoking Gun [update 4]

You’ve no doubt heard it said that what ClimateGate exposed was only about scientists behaving badly, that it said nothing about the underlying science, that all it showed was some bad practice and some bad language but the data is OK. 

People who say that are wrong. As Willis Eschenbach demonstrates,

At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin [Airport].”

Let me explain as briefly as I can. There are three world data sets in which the raw temperature is collected and maintained.  The East Anglia Climate Research Unit’s Phil Jones lost one set, the one labelled CRU, but the basic one on which all three rely is the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).

Their figures purport to show that temperatures over the last century rose by around 0.6 degrees Celsius.  But when Eschenbach looked at the GHCN date set for Australia, he discovered that for no reason whatsoever, the GHCN boffins applied a temperature adjustment of 2.4 degrees Celsius, changing this

into this!

That black line you see on the bottom graph is the adjustment.

Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celsius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celsius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys ‘adjust,’ they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.”

Folks, the temperature record is stuffed. Its collection methods and materials are shoddy beyond words, and the manipulation of data is beyond dishonest.

Coming just a fortnight after NIWA were exposed as data manipulators, and three weeks after the ClimateGate hack was released to the world, this exposes what’s now going on in CopenHagen as nothing more than a simple but effective con.

Read the whole piece here: The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero, at WATTS UP WITH THAT. It’s a doozy.

UPDATE: ClimateGate is getting legs in the media. TVNZ’s CloseUp devoted ten minutes last night to a debate (first time I can remember seeing that in prime time on the state’s broadcaster), and even CNN is beginning to horn in on the issues. They talk in the clip below to Steven McIntyre (mentioned in so many of those hacked emails), Chris Horner and Michael Oppenheimer of the IPCC.  McIntyre explains the”trick” about which so much has been said. You’ll recall that now infamous email:

I've just completed Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick of adding in real temps to each series for the last 20 years ... and from 1961 ... to hide the decline."
- Climate Research Unit Director Phil Jones writing to Mann and others on Nov. 16, 1999.

Mann has come out saying that by "trick" they meant a clever way to solve the problem.  But as McIntyre says in a recent Chicago Tribune article, the 'trick' was not clever so much as it was misleading—and in essence it was quite simple: instead of showing the decline in their tree-ring data, they decided instead to not show it [hat tip Not Evil].

Phil Sage has the trick, and as you’ll see its hardly clever.  Watch the video first, in which McIntyre also explains in simple language the relevance of the trick and of the tree-ring data:

UPDATE 2: And the BBC, where Nigel Lawson clashes with Environment Secretary Ed Miliband [hat tip Climate Realists:

UPDATE 3: The science is settled? Not so, say 141 scientists from 17 countries, including six scientists from New Zealand, who signed an open letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon which was tabled today at CopenHagen. 

The letter challenged the UNFCCC and supporters of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to produce convincing observational evidence for their claims of dangerous human-caused global warming and other changes in climate – specifically, for each each of the ten fundamental assertions that underlie current climate concerns – see http://www.copenhagenclimatechallenge.org/.

     The six, Drs Jock Allison (Dunedin), Chris de Freitas (Auckland), Willem de Lange (Hamilton), Vincent Gray (Wellington), David Kear (Whakatane) and Gerrit van der Lingen (Christchurch) have joined 135 international colleagues in challenging supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate evidence of 10 specific climate related claims, including that variations in global climate in the last 100 years are outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries, and that humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ are having a dangerous impact on global climate.
    “ ‘With revelations that critical temperature data used by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change appear to have been intentionally distorted to increase warming trends, national representatives to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference must demand a thorough re-examination of the scientific evidence supporting proposed mitigation actions,’ said challenge endorser Dr. Tim Patterson, ICSC Chair and Professor of Earth Sciences at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). ‘This should not be limited to simple temperature data auditing but must also include a re-evaluation of many of the climate-related assertions uncritically accepted by politicians and media worldwide.’
    “Most significant among the scientists’ challenges was for proponents of AGW theory to comprehensively substantiate claims that:

• Recent climate change is unusual in comparison with historical records;
• Human emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are dangerously impacting climate;
• Computer-based models are reliable indicators of future climate.

    “ ‘The science of climate change is not settled; it is evolving rapidly with critically important discoveries, many of which contradict IPCC findings, coming out every month,’ said ICSC science advisor, Dr. Robert M. Carter, also a challenge endorser and Professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University (Townsville, Australia), currently at sea on a field trip taking sediment samples from ocean depths off the South Island.  ‘The already weak case for dangerous man-made global warming is getting weaker still as our understandings advance, so governments need a several decade long time-out while the science matures before even considering the possibility of GHG emission restrictions.’
    “ ‘While policies designed to conserve energy, reduce pollution and help vulnerable peoples adapt to climate change are important to pursue, proposals to severely curtail GHG emissions in an effort to control climate make no sense, given the current state of scientific knowledge,’ concludes Challenge endorser Dr. Wibjörn Karlén, Professor Emeritus, Physical Geography, Stockholm University (Uppsala, Sweden). ‘Instead we need to focus on environmental issues we know we can positively impact - air, land and water pollution being primary examples.’ ”

UPDATE 4: “Climate Claims Fail the Science Test” says Melbourne geoscientist Michael Asten summarising the first day of the Copenhagen climate party for The Australian newspaper. Apparently, says Asten, there was too much dissent and too many inconvenient truths emerging to satisfy the warmist express. Even Little Aussie Warmist Tim Flannery, strutting around as chairman of the grandly-named Copenhagen Climate Council, had to admit that, "We can't pretend we have perfect knowledge: we don't."

    We had the ‘grandfather of climate change,’ James Hansen, describing the proceedings as counter-productive and "a farce", while the chief Saudi Arabian negotiator to the summit, Mohammed al-Sabban, doubts the current science and suggests there is no longer any point in seeking agreement to reduce emissions. . .
    “Results released this year suggest that the degree of scientific certainty falls short of that desirable before we set binding targets and dollar values on carbon emissions. . . ..meanwhile two recent results published by top scientists cast doubt on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's theory about the link between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming. . . These are of of significance because whereas the climate models used by the IPCC rely on software to represent a large number of highly complex Earth processes, these results are equivalent to experimental observations on the Earth itself. . .”
    “Another key parameter in climate modelling is the warming amplification associated with increasing CO2 in our atmosphere.
    “This amplification factor is generally believed to be greater than one, giving rise to an understanding that increases in atmospheric CO2 amplify warming (a positive feedback in the physical process), and the IPCC has quantified this to deliver the finding that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in man-made greenhouse gas concentrations.
    However since the IPCC's fourth report, our Laboratory Earth has also delivered new data on this CO2-induced amplification factor.”
    “The result of [this analysis by John Christy and colleague David Douglass] is a CO2-induced amplification factor close to one, which has implications clearly at odds with the earlier IPCC position. . .
    “What this means is that the IPCC model for climate sensitivity is not supported by experimental observation on ancient ice ages and recent satellite data.”

Read the whole account here: Climate Claims Fail the Science Test [hat tip Micky’s Muses]