To Denmark, From Russia, With Lies

Source: http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=515789

A journalist reads the latest draft of the Copenhagen Accord at the climate summit in Denmark. APView Enlarged Image

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia?

Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change.

Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public."

Chutzpah has been redefined.

As Ronald Reagan used to say, facts are stubborn things. The fact is that imminent man-made climate disaster has been shown to be a massive fraud driven by manipulated data and deliberate suppression of facts to the contrary.

The latest Climate-gate shoe to drop is the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) accusation that the Hadley Center of Britain's Meteorological Office deliberately relied on a carefully selected 25% of Russia's weather stations that fit its theory of global warming.

By ignoring those that don't, the Russians say, the CRU overestimated warming in the country by more than half a degree Celsius.

Russia accounts for 12.5% of the earth's land mass and has weather stations throughout, so ignoring vast swaths of it can greatly skew any analysis. The IEA says CRU ignored data covering 40% of Russia, preferring data from urban centers and data that showed a warming trend. On the final page of the IEA report is a chart that shows the CRU's selective use of Russian data produced 0.64C more warming than using all the data would have done.

Steve McIntyre at ClimateAudit reports that the CRU has long been suspected of misusing Russian data. He notes a March 2004 e-mail from CRU director Phil Jones to Mann that says: "Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears (in these journals) I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL." (JGR and GRL are scientific journals).

Siberia has played a pivotal role in this outright fraud. In 1995, a paper by the CRU's Keith Briffa asserted the medieval warm period was actually really cold, and recent warming is unusually warm. It relied on tree ring data from trees on Siberia's Yamal Peninsula.

Here too data were carefully selected. Those from just 12 trees from 252 cores in the Yamal data set were used. A larger set of 34 tree cores from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the Middle Ages. They weren't used.

The hockey-stick graph was produced in 1999 by Mann using these manipulated tree ring data. The graph supposedly proved air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century. Mann et al. had to make the Medieval Warm Period (A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850) statistically disappear.

McIntyre, who with fellow Canadian researcher Ross McKitrick exposed the hockey-stick fraud, says the evidence from only one Siberian tree, known as YAD061, seemed to show a hockey-stick pattern. If they look hard enough, the CRU can probably find a tree that shows evidence of elves making cookies.

This tree spawned the hockey stick that found its way into the reports of the U.N.'s climate change panel. It led to Kyoto and Copenhagen, which is why McIntyre calls it "the most influential tree in the world." As the CRU e-mails and other evidence reveal, Mann and his unindicted co-conspirators are barking up the wrong one.