More data fudging from the IPCC

Good to see that some people are challenging their data...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body pushing for laws that would limit man-made carbon emissions through a series of ultra-draconian regulations aimed primarily at developed nations, has a dirty little secret: its scientists have fudged their data to make the global warming picture look worse than it actually is.

That’s what Douglas J. Keenan, an obvious global warming denier who bothered to check the documentation used by the IPCC’s chief climatologist, Dr. P. D. Jones in the IPCC’s latest report.

Jones, in conjunction with several other scientists published a paper purporting to use long-term data from 84 weather stations in China. The authors claimed these stations were chosen on the basis that they had not been changed or relocated since 1954 so that their data stream would provide a reliable record of temperatures over a 30+-year period.

Jones and his associates and later another IPCC scientist named Wang issued a similar report claimed that the stations were used because they had not been moved over a long period of time. "The stations were selected on the basis of station history: we chose those with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times. [Jones et al.] They were chosen based on station histories: selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times...." [Wang et al.]

But when checking over the claims made by Dr. Jones, Wang and their associates, Keenan discovered discrepancies that he says couldn’t possibly be accidental. So the only logical conclusion is that Jones and his cohorts lied. Keenan’s charge stemmed from the fact that the United States Department of Energy and the Chinese Academy of Sciences issued a joint report, which stated that 49 of the 84 weather stations had no history as to location, or instrumentation changes available. The remaining 35 stations, Keenan discovered, had indeed had changes in instrumentation and movement, in one case, movement as much as 41 kms.

The significance of moving a weather recording station, according to Keenan, is that if a station is relocated downwind of a city from being formerly upwind, then the temperatures it records will tend to be higher, as cities generate heat. Conversely if a weather station is relocated near a lake, its overall temperature recordings will tend to be lower than before. Sometimes a move of as little as 100 meters will make a significant difference in the data recorded.