There's been an emerging scandal with regard to some peer-reviewed AGW studies. Seems people have been "creating" the outcomes they want and reviewers have let them slide.
"Treemometers: A new scientific scandal"
If a peer review fails in the woods..
"A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent peer-reviewed climate papers.
The scandal has serious implications for public trust in science. The IPCC's mission is to reflect the science, not create it.
At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.
At issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy, or dendrochronology. Using statistical techniques, researchers take the ring data to create a "reconstruction" of historical temperature anomalies. But trees are a highly controversial indicator of temperature, since the rings principally record Co2, and also record humidity, rainfall, nutrient intake and other local factors....
Data used over the years by the IPCC and others to make claims about global warming is missing and flawed.
In particular, since 2000, a large number of peer-reviewed climate papers have incorporated data from trees at the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. This dataset gained favour, curiously superseding a newer and larger data set from nearby. The older Yamal trees indicated pronounced and dramatic uptick in temperatures.
How could this be? Scientists have ensured much of the measurement data used in the reconstructions remains a secret - failing to fulfill procedures to archive the raw data. Without the raw data, other scientists could not reproduce the results. The most prestigious peer reviewed journals, including Nature and Science, were reluctant to demand the data from contributors. Until now, that is.
At the insistence of editors of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions B the data has leaked into the open - and Yamal's mystery is no more.
From this we know that the Yamal data set uses just 12 trees from a larger set to produce its dramatic recent trend. Yet many more were cored, and a larger data set (of 34) from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/
On missing data:
"The Dog Ate Global Warming
Interpreting climate data can be hard enough. What if some key data have been fiddled?"
"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 Climatic 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.?
It needs to be emphasized that this warming "data" was refined and processed since raw data was considered unreliable. Temperature sensors vary due local circumstances so to get a "global" reading there were edges that needed smoothing.
"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."
It's the raw data that is now said to be "missing".
Jones (the Jones of "Jones and Wigley") has rejected requests from other researchers to review the raw data. He told one researcher making a request:
"?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??
As more researchers tried to get the data Jones said the data was essentially missing
"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."
This claim of lost data was made despite some researchers having been given the data when they requested it. 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.
As Jones was confronted with more Freedom of Information Act requests, he "refused them all, saying that there were ?confidentiality? agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data." Others 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."
"The Dog Ate Global Warming"
http://article.nationalreview....DI5MGY4ZWI5OWM=&w=MA==
It seems a researcher deemed sympathetic to AGW could get data while anyone considered contentious has been given excuses and deceptions.
"Treemometers: A new scientific scandal"
If a peer review fails in the woods..
"A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent peer-reviewed climate papers.
The scandal has serious implications for public trust in science. The IPCC's mission is to reflect the science, not create it.
At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.
At issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy, or dendrochronology. Using statistical techniques, researchers take the ring data to create a "reconstruction" of historical temperature anomalies. But trees are a highly controversial indicator of temperature, since the rings principally record Co2, and also record humidity, rainfall, nutrient intake and other local factors....
Data used over the years by the IPCC and others to make claims about global warming is missing and flawed.
In particular, since 2000, a large number of peer-reviewed climate papers have incorporated data from trees at the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. This dataset gained favour, curiously superseding a newer and larger data set from nearby. The older Yamal trees indicated pronounced and dramatic uptick in temperatures.
How could this be? Scientists have ensured much of the measurement data used in the reconstructions remains a secret - failing to fulfill procedures to archive the raw data. Without the raw data, other scientists could not reproduce the results. The most prestigious peer reviewed journals, including Nature and Science, were reluctant to demand the data from contributors. Until now, that is.
At the insistence of editors of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions B the data has leaked into the open - and Yamal's mystery is no more.
From this we know that the Yamal data set uses just 12 trees from a larger set to produce its dramatic recent trend. Yet many more were cored, and a larger data set (of 34) from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/
On missing data:
"The Dog Ate Global Warming
Interpreting climate data can be hard enough. What if some key data have been fiddled?"
"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 Climatic 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.?
It needs to be emphasized that this warming "data" was refined and processed since raw data was considered unreliable. Temperature sensors vary due local circumstances so to get a "global" reading there were edges that needed smoothing.
"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."
It's the raw data that is now said to be "missing".
Jones (the Jones of "Jones and Wigley") has rejected requests from other researchers to review the raw data. He told one researcher making a request:
"?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??
As more researchers tried to get the data Jones said the data was essentially missing
"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."
This claim of lost data was made despite some researchers having been given the data when they requested it. 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.
As Jones was confronted with more Freedom of Information Act requests, he "refused them all, saying that there were ?confidentiality? agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data." Others 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."
"The Dog Ate Global Warming"
http://article.nationalreview....DI5MGY4ZWI5OWM=&w=MA==
It seems a researcher deemed sympathetic to AGW could get data while anyone considered contentious has been given excuses and deceptions.
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