CAGW seemed to be firmly entrenched, especially from a science angle – until a few retired people with an addiction to messing around on the internet, started to prod and poke around, and now it seems the anchors that kept CAGW embedded are one by one slipping away – and the tide is going out. At http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/16/kiwi-weather-station-data-shenanig… …. the New Zealand National Institute for Atmospheric and Water Research is being taken to court over inaccurate temperature recording. Their figures are being challenged because they are inordinately higher than other countries.
Meanwhile, news of another paper upsetting the Hockey Stick applecart – published this July in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology and Palaeoecology and finds that the medieval warming was greater than 20th century warming. Oxygen isotopes from Viking age limpet shells in the Orkneys form the core of the research (see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/17/another-paper-refutes-the-mann-mad…)
How is it all done? Steven Goddard provides a clue. He illustrates how raw temperature data is adjusted, turning what is a cooling trend into a positive warming trend – go to http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/how-ushcn-hides-the-declin… … which has a nice little graph that changes light and colour, displaying the extent of the fiddle in one eye full. It works just like a computer gadget. However, the adjusted data is then presented to the gullible political class and is used to dictate policy. Very interesting when you consider all the hype this week about government funding rail improvements. Why do the government want bums on seats in trains? They've been fed this kind of fiddled data – and swallow it whole. Goddard accuses the manipulators of the data of being like Enron accountants – and I suppose that is a good analogy. Modern economics seems to involve fantasy models which are likewise highly attractive to the political policy makers – and look where that has led them, down a street with a big hole and no warning barriers or flashing yellow or red lights. Its enough to make you roll in the aisles.
Meanwhile, at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/17/new-paper-blames-about-half-of-glo… …. which is another glib term for cooking the books. See 'European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2012, Geophysical Research Abstracts, volume 14, 956-1 European Geosciences Union 2012'. However, see a more constrained point of view at www.climateaudit.org/2012/07/17/station-homogenization-as-a-statistical-… … its a long read but the comments make this work. The Watts comments are more rabid, one might say, and the CA comments more knowledgeable. Quite revealing. Homogenisation, it seems, is necessary, but it is how they do it that counts.
Just to rub salt into the wound over at http://notrickszone.com/2012/07/17/heimholtz-centre-for-ocean-research-c… … it seems it is not just the Met Office that is consistently wrong when it comes to drought and barbecue summers but the Heimholtz Centre in Germany is equally as bad at predicting the weather for longer than a week in advance. The inconvenient results of earlier models are coming home to roost. Climate scientists have failed to get the last ten years right – yet they are adamant they know what is going to happen over the next 100 years. This is setting up to be a comedians paradise – but how many times can you tell the same kind of joke?