Climategate may be about to go nuclear. So far, the lame excuse of the alarmist community was that Climategate’s purloined e-mails may have shown attempts to stifle heterodox thinking and bully professional journals, but the data that allegedly proves global warming was not in any way compromised. If the Guardian’s reporting is right, this defense may soon be inoperative. From the story:
Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based. A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced. Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue. Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.
The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.
That last assertion is open to question—especially given the parallel scandals of false claims regarding Himalayan glacier melting, etc. In any event, the “minor errors,” as they are being called are beginning to add up, and as a result, the credibility of the entire global warming case is really under a cloud. The time has long since past for an open and independent investigation by a Congressional and international committees with subpoena power and the capacity to take testimony under oath.
It also turns out a lot of information was improperly being held close to the scientists’ vests:
The revelations come at a torrid time for climate science, with the IPPC suffering heavy criticism for its use of information that had not been rigorously checked – in particular a false claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 – and UEA having been criticised last week by the deputy information commissioner for refusing valid requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act. The Guardian has learned that of 105 freedom of information requests to the university concerning the climatic research unit (CRU), which Jones headed up to the end of December, only 10 had been released in full.
The Times of London, the Telegraph, and the Guardian are doing real journalism on the ongoing science scandals involving global warming. That raises an important question: Where are the American media?
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