Wednesday, December 16, 2009

The Russians are coming


The Climategate story just got bigger – from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap and sent to us from the CEI in Washington (ain't the internet wonderful!). It explains how the Met Office Hadley Centre appears to have been cherry-picking Russian temperature data, to pick the stations which show the warmer temperatures ... a variation on "hide the decline".

James Delingpole is running with it ... and here, plus Big Government has an interesting piece. Now also done by WUWT. The original paper is here (in Russian), with a rough machine translation here.

Steve McIntyre also blogs it, linking it with the CRU e-mails showing that Phil Jones, acting as a reviewer of the CRU data used in the HadCRUT gridded temperature, "went to town” to block the publication of criticisms of his handling of Russian data."

Unusually for us, the article is posted in full (our emphasis) below. The graph above is a temperature plot using some of the data not used by Hadley; it shows the absence of a warming trend.
A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as "Climategate," continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global warming.

The incident involved an e-mail server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, East England. Unknown persons stole and anonymously disseminated thousands of e-mails and other documents dealing with the global-warming issue made over the course of 13 years.

Controversy arose after various allegations were made including that climate scientists colluded to withhold scientific evidence and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is.

Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country's territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.

On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world's land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.

Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.
Icecap notes: recall it is in Soviet Union that the CRU, NOAA, NASA show the greatest warming. As this story implies, there was no obvious reason for these data centres to be selective about stations. It implies the stations often selected were urban and those with incomplete data, providing more opportunity for mischief.

This, as they say, is SERIAL!

CLIMATEGATE THREAD