The Climategate Revelations Keep Opening Up...

As expected, the Climategate revelations keep opening up. The latest installments of the scandal—and it is all one big, interconnected scandal—include the UN being forced to admit that one of its dire predictions about melting glaciers was completely manufactured out of thin air.

But bigger than that is the development I said to watch for in the new year: the exposure of the basic temperature record itself as fraudulent and manipulated, calling into attention the very claim that there has been any warming at all, no matter what its cause.

Below, Weather Channel founder John Coleman—a fierce global warming skeptic since the beginning—describes these findings and links to a longer article from Jospeh D'Aleo.

What I find interesting about both of these "new" revelations, however, is that I've heard rumblings about them for some time and even covered this story in bits and pieces in TIA Daily. What is new is not so much the story—but the fact that the story is getting press and attention, and that the warming establishment is being forced to admit some of its errors.

That is the consequence of Climategate. The code of silence which says that you cannot doubt global warming is being broken down, and the floodgates of skepticism are about to open.

"Primary United States Climate Centers Now Caught in Data Manipulation," John Coleman, Coleman's Comments, January 14

It has been revealed that a "sleight of hand" was used in the computer program that rated 2005 as "THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD." Skeptical climate researchers have discovered extensive manipulation of the data within the US Government's two primary climate centers: the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City. These centers are being accused of creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based….

"Opening, unraveling and understanding what is happening in a complex FORTRAN computer code, with 20 years of age and change in it, is a difficult and grueling task," [E. Michael Smith] says, "and the deeper I dug the more amazing the details revealed. When doing a benchmark test of the program, I found patterns in the input data from NCDC that looked like dramatic and selective deletions of thermometers from cold locations." Smith says after awhile, it became clear this was not a random strange pattern he was finding, but a well designed and orchestrated manipulation process. "The more I looked, the more I found patterns of deletion that could not be accidental. Thermometers moved from cold mountains to warm beaches; from Siberian Arctic to more southerly locations and from pristine rural locations to jet airport tarmacs. The last remaining Arctic thermometer in Canada is in a place called 'The Garden Spot of the Arctic,' always moving away from the cold and toward the heat. I could not believe it was so blatant and it clearly looked like it was in support of an agenda," Smith says.

Here are the numbers behind the startling findings of the new research paper. The number of actual weather observation points used as a starting point for world average temperatures has been reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 in the most recent years. Still, more stations are dropped out in related programs and in the final NASA/GIStemp data file, it drops to about 1,000. That leaves much of the world unaccounted for," says Joseph D'Aleo of ICECAP.us and SPPI.org, who has released a research study of the global temperature pattern today….

E. Michael Smith pointed out that the November 2009 "anomaly map" from GISS shows a very hot Bolivia, which is covered by high mountains. "One small problem: there have been no temperatures recorded in the NCDC data set for Bolivia since 1990. NASA/GISS have to fill in or make up the numbers from up to 1200km away. This is on the beach in Peru or in the Amazon jungle," he said.



Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist (TIA) and contributor to The Freedom Fighter's Journal