Climategate, the gift that keeps on giving.

One of the effects of Climategate is that the 'science' is coming under more scrutiny and the MSM have finally woken up to the fact there's a story to be told. Would we have had Glaciergate without Climategate? Well, yes, obviously. If Rule 34 of the internet is that if it exists there will be porn of it then 35 must be that everything that happens will eventually be blogged, but whether the media would have bothered with it is something else entirely. That means we may soon see some attention being paid to this:

GISS, based at Columbia University in New York City, has adjusted over a century’s worth of temperature records from the vast Queensland State (the Sunshine State) to reverse a cooling trend in one ground weather station and increase a warming trend in another to skew the overall data set.

Independent analysis by Aussie blogger Ken Stewart exposes a deplorable smoking gun of cynical manipulation of raw temperature data.

The process of adjusting raw data to create a “homogenised” final global temperature chart is standard practice by climatologists whose work is relied upon by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and world governments. This homogenisation process of temperature data has fallen into disrepute since the Climategate scandal where scientists were proven to have unlawfully used a “trick” to fake climate data and then destroyed their calculations rendering it impossible for independent auditors to examine and justify the methodologies used.

Ken Stewart has his own take on these latest findings from Down Under: “Wow- when they adjust, they don’t muck around!”

What Ken found was that a station in the middle of a fucking field of sugar cane was being treated as an urban site, which in turn means a different adjustment procedure that turned a fairly flat temperature line over the last century into a very clear warming trend.

Ken found that the “Mackay Sugar Mill Station” was far hotter in the 1920’s and 30’s but GISS “disappeared” this data. However, if we add the warming period back in we find that the warming trend almost disappears to become less then 0.2 degrees per 100 years!

Ken concludes, “How can GISS justify their manipulation of the data, which they claim not to do?”

Upon closer examination of GISS methodology it appears that accidentally on purpose they used a “trick” whereby they turned “Mackay Sugar Mill Station” into a small town rather than a rural station even though it’s been nothing much more than cane fields for the last 130 years. There are different procedures applied to homogenising data between urban and rural weather stations.

In other words, more bullshit and poor procedure. Sorry, yet more bullshit and bad procedure. This may well have been accidental rather than deliberate since, as has been pointed out before, ground stations are rarely surveyed for quality by those who use their data, so it's unlikely that anyone from GISS went and checked. I mean, GISS are based in New York, so how could they possibly check the surrounding area of a site in Queensland?

Ah.

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And these tools wonder why we're fucking sceptical? It's because this kind of thing keeps happening. Lousy proxies are used, algorithms are designed that turn out to give the same results with random numbers, declines are hidden, data that should be freely available isn't, researchers refuse to show their work (come on, you didn't get the marks at school level maths if you couldn't show your working), scare stories that have no foundation end up in official reports that go on to be the base of policy for governments around the world. It just goes on and on and on - at the least unreliable and at the worst potentially fraudulent and certainly, as far as the UK's Freedom of Information Act goes, criminal. And now it turns out that the station data is tainted too, which of course we knew from the WUWT station survey in the US but this shows that outside the US isn't any more reliable. How could it be otherwise when it's the same people involved?

Go read the rest of Ken's findings at his blog.

H/T Bishop Hill and WUWT.