Secrecy in the climate world....

A lot of the data going into those climate change models is subject to secrecy...

The data-handling error - the assumption that one set of numbers was identical to another when it was not - was discovered by Canadian researcher Steve McIntyre, who notified NASA on Aug. 4. NASA almost immediately corrected its Web site, but without any notice of the changes. You can bet that if the correction had shifted the data the other way, there would have been press releases, news conferences and lugubrious music on the TV news. As it was, it was left to the conservative blogosphere to spread the word; the mainstream media ignored the episode.
That’s not the worst of it. NASA refused to release to McIntyre the computer codes it used to make the correction, though a huge amount of the agency’s other climate codes are online. McIntyre believes there are “real and interesting statistical issues” involved in the records of the observing stations on which NASA relies, issues of whether the proper corrections have been made for the well-known “heat island” effects of urban areas. Most warming believers take it on faith that they have; McIntyre says he knows of too many instances where a thermometer has been placed closer than 100 feet to a paved surface.