I'll admit that I am shocked at the breadth of the problem here. If this kind of malfeasance occurred in the business world you would be fired. In the military, you would be relieved of command. In academia, do you get some kind of a pass? Due to tenure or something? Which was adopted to preclude undue influence and allow some freedom to pursue unbiased research?
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2009/12/08/john-lott-climate-gate-global-warming-east-anglia/
It is not just the University of East Anglia that has been accused of massaging the data (what they called creating "value added" data). Recently, New Zealand has also had its temperature series from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) challenged. Still the NIWA continues to insist that the "Warming over New Zealand through the past is unequivocal." Indeed, the institute claims that the New Zealand warming trend was 50 percent higher than the global average. But the difference in graphs between what NIWA produced after massaging the data and what the original raw data showed was truly remarkable and can be seen here.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ja...shame-deepens/
As the Climate Science Coalition of New Zealand charged: "The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below." Similar concerns have also been raised about Australian temperature data.
Hmm. You say, "If this kind of malfeasance occurred in the business world you would be fired." Let me fix that for you: "If this kind of sound science occurred in my partisan world you would be fired." There, much more accurate.
While it's easy for partisans to cherry pick details out of context and spin this into a "shocking" scandal, the truth is much more mundane. The readings weren't "artificially" anything. They were adjusted according to standard accepted scientific principles in order to present an apples to apples view of data over time.
The source of this data, the New Zealand Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research, addresses the false attacks on their site:
For example, they adjust readings when they move recording stations to new locations at different altitudes. You don't have to be a climatologist to understand that moving a thermometer to a higher elevation results in lower average temperature readings. If one fails to adjust for this, it will appear that temperatures have declined. Therefore, they quite properly adjusted the data to compensate for altitude changes.
On their site they offer comparisons with other, not-moved reporting stations to show their adjustments correlate almost perfectly. In short, their adjustments make the data
more accurate, not less. Beyond that, "There are eleven sites around NZ where the climate stations have not moved significantly for many decades. These sites show a warming trend of 1°C since the 1930s." In other words, that unadjusted raw data also demonstrates warming, just as their adjusted data does. There's much more at the site, including their raw data.
Fox "News" and the UK
Telegraph naturally avoid such inconvenient details in their zeal to blow smoke and stir controversy. Fortunately, that's not a "shocking truth" to anyone who's familiar with the op-ed propaganda from wing-nut tabloids PJ relies on for his endless shilling.
By the way, be sure to read the FactCheck link above if you haven't already. It nicely exposes much of disinformation being spread by the deniers.
