Is It Getting Hot In Here?

Maybe not, if the recent revelation regarding a data dump in this article is correct, "Climate Change Data Dumped."

Before I go any further, let me say I have been shocked by the revelation found in recently hacked emails from New Zealand that raise great suspicion regarding the validity of Global Warming. I have long supported organizations fighting against global warming, even giving monthly contributions to the Union of Concerned Scientists. I bought Al Gore's documentary, for pete's sake. I'm telling you, I have long been one of those yelling about the damage we have done/are doing to this planet.

And now we are finding out that it may have all been a bunch of hooey (or at least hyped up)?? Are you kidding me??

Here is more from the "Data Dump" article:

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.”

Oh, boy. Well, gosh - I guess when we were demonizing this "climate sceptics," we were, um, wrr, wrrrooo, ahem - um, wrong to do so. Dammit. Don't you just HATE when that happens? (Huh - probably how a lot of former Obama sycophants are feeling right about now...)

There's more:

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.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their 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.

Well, yes, that's what they say, but I think everyone can agree that the whole thing about SCIENCE is having DATA to use to formulate scientific conclusions. Absent of that information, it is simply, well, opinion.

This revelation, from the emails to the data dump, is being referred to as "Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation ," highlighting why this is so important:

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Are you as taken aback by this as I am? How many years have we been hearing about global warming? When the scientists who are working on this admit in emails their duplicity, it calls everything into question:

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

And now you know why this is being referred to as "Climate Gate" by James Delingpole of the Telegraph(UK). This is also why many are calling for the meeting in Copenhagen to be called off immediately until this can all be sorted out. That is not a bad idea, and one I would certainly support.

Until then, I am trying to wrap my head around the very real possibility that we all have been sold a bill of goods on a massive scale. Not only is that infuriating, but the possibility of that happening is extremely disconcerting when you start to realize the sheer magnitude of this scandal. Staggering that so many of us around the globe may have been had...