Global Warming: Data Not Required

Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know. He now has written an article for National Review Online describing the closed and missing data which is the foundation for the AGW scare.

As I understand it,

1. Two persons, Jones and Wigley, at the UK’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) located at the University of East Anglia, control all the historical data. This data was the basis for the U.N.’s I.P.C.C. to claim “discernible human influence on global climate.”

2. Those persons won’t release the data for a replicative analysis. They claim “confidentiality” agreements with countries supplying the data. Confidentiality?? On critical scientific data?? How absurd can this get?

3. Those persons also claim that the original data no longer exists; only the “adjusted”, "homogenized" data remains.

4. Those persons have released portions of the original raw data to an apparently AGW-friendly colleague, Peter Webster at Georgia Tech, just this year, who won’t release the data either.

Michaels:

“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 Climate 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.”

”Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.

”So 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.

”Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “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?”

”Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to “try and find something wrong.” The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.”

AGW is not science; it is an agenda of the Left. It’s intent goes beyond lifestyle control of every citizen of the developed world. It goes to global taxation and punishment authority, controlled by the elites intent on humanist equalizing of all peoples – at the lowest common economic denominator if necessary.

The Left loves the aura of science and hates any data that deviates from their expectations. The result is totally anti-intellectual-integrity, which doesn’t bother the Left a bit. The Left needs crises, and data be damned – it is the moral authority imbued by the “crisis” that gives them the authority, the power that they crave. And the "crisis" must be preserved at all costs, even the sacrifice of any appearance of scientific integrity.

I have written before that following the money helps one understand the "scientific" support for this and any other crisis science. Vast sums of money go into the crisis, and parasites are there to suck it up. Al Gore, for example, is all set to profit from "green" legislation: he owns stock in many green corporations that will feed at the taxpayer's trough.

It's an ill crisis that fattens no parasite.