I confess to being less of a "global warming skeptic" than I believe my fellow Power Liners, John and Scott, are. But I become pretty skeptical pretty quickly when I read that scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) - the ones whose email correspondence reveals less than a solid commitment to honesty in science - have admitted that much of the raw data upon which their conclusions regarding global warming over the past 150 years are based was thrown out by the CRU. They claim that the documents were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
Without the underlying data, other scientists cannot check the work that gives rise to the CRU's findings of a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years. As the Times of London points out, these findings "are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity."
In the law, the discovery of this sort of intentional document destruction would quite likely give rise to some form of "adverse inference instruction," wherein the judge would instruct or encourage the jury to assume that the discarded evidence was harmful to the case of the party that destroyed it. I might be hesitant to apply this logic to the world of scientific inquiry were it not for the fact that the CRU scientists have demonstrated as little regard for honest adjudication of their position as your run-of-the-mill spoliator of evidence.
To be sure, the current head of the CRU was not in charge when the data were thrown away in the 1980s. Moreover, climate change was not such a heavily politicized issue in those days.
Still, Roger Pielke, the Colorado professor who asked for the records, is quite correct when he says that the CRU is basically insisting that we trust it, a demand that's inconsistent with the scientific method for resolving debates.
One need not be a hard-core global warming skeptic to question whether we should alter the way we live in response to predictions based on findings that cannot be checked because the raw data was intentionally destroyed by the outfit that made the findings.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/11/025051.php
The raw data still exists. It's just not housed at the CRU. Anyone wanting to reconstruct the CRU models could do so by going to the originators of the raw data and reassembling them. The CRU isn't an information gathering organization, their job is to collate the information.This link has already been posted, but if you keep posting the same thing, I might as well too.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archi...#comment-145948
Meh... realclimate was the website that the emails said would toe the line for them no matter what. They went so far as to state that it used a facade of impartiality to give it more credibility. You have a better source?
Where did you read this?Here are the site's data sources:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-...limate_data_raw
They are pretty clear about their intentions in this email:To: Tim Osborn , Keith Briffa
Subject: update
Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:51:53 -0500
Reply-to: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Cc: Gavin Schmidt
guys, I see that Science has already gone online w/ the new issue, so we
put up the RC post. By now, you've probably read that nasty McIntyre
thing. Apparently, he violated the embargo on his website (I don't go
there personally, but so I'm informed).
Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you're free to use RC in any way
you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about
what comments we screen through, and we'll be very careful to answer any
questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you
might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold
comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think
they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you'd
like us to include.
You're also welcome to do a followup guest post, etc. think of RC as a
resource that is at your disposal to combat any disinformation put
forward by the McIntyres of the world. Just let us know. We'll use our
best discretion to make sure the skeptics dont'get to use the RC
comments as a megaphone...
mike
--
Michael E. Mann
Associate Professor
Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)