ClimateGate fallout continues: CRU admits original data deleted
The UK Times Online reports an explosive admission coming forth from the CRU in the aftermath of the ClimateGate revelations (via Memeorandum):
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 UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
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 admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.
Show of hands how many doubt that the data dumping was only “in order to save space”?
I didn’t think so.
In no other line of work would data dumping and suppression be tolerated (that is, unless you work for the Obama administration); in fact, in most places where this sort of data manipulation is discovered, your a** is grass – meaning that not only are you out of a job, but that you’ve been thoroughly discredited. Leading global warming skeptic Christopher Booker writes:
Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre’s demolition of the “hockey stick”, he excoriated the way in which this same “tightly knit group” of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to “peer review” each other’s papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.
The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.
No, they shouldn’t, but the whole “man-made” global warming issue has been “owned” for decades by Democrat AGW elites here at home – including the Goracle – and AGW elites abroad, like the UEA CRU. Governments, political parties, AGW alarmists, “green” industries, celebrities, mainstream media news outlets, TV networks like NBC, special interest groups – all of these close-knit groups have both personal and professional vested interests in keeping the myth of “man-made” global warming alive, and suffice it to say that they will work hard to “contain” this scandal. But every once in a while, a scandal comes along that is too big for even the most powerful to keep under the lid. And this scandal may very well be one of them.
Stay tuned.