The Dog Ate Global Warming

Interpreting climate data can be hard enough. What if some key data have
been fiddled?

By Patrick J. Michaels

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature.
Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific
basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical
footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session
talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen
in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the
gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some
discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and
they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy,
scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established
the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive
history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and
Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as
the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC
to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”

Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t
really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually
established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that
induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around
thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by
the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations
themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat
vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.

So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are
required to verify models of global warming aren’t the original records at
all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren’t specific about what was done to
which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the
IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/– 0.2°C in the 20th century.

Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where
that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking
for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to
replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why
should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find
something wrong with it?”

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific
thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to “try and find
something wrong.” The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well
that, indeed, nothing is wrong.

Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster told
Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and
Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of
Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by
the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial
temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn’t have the data because he
wasn’t an “academic.” So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the
University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all,
saying that there were “confidentiality” agreements regarding the data
between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre’s blog readers
then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful
turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very
vague language.

It’s worth noting that McKitrick and I had published papers demonstrating
that the quality of land-based records is so poor that the warming trend
estimated since 1979 (the first year for which we could compare those
records to independent data from satellites) may have been overestimated by
50 percent. Webster, who received the CRU data, published studies linking
changes in hurricane patterns to warming (while others have found otherwise).

Enter the dog that ate global warming.

Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at the
University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones
responded:

*Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing
series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within
a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely
available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not
able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series
after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the
original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and
homogenized) data.*

The statement about “data storage” is balderdash. They got the records from
somewhere. The files went onto a computer. All of the original data could
easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the mid-1980s. I had all of
the world’s surface barometric pressure data on one such tape in 1979.

If we are to believe Jones’s note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the
original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The
letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter
Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What
was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?

All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that
the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket
this fall — whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to
step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law,
which can’t be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there
are no data, there’s no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer
to the question posed above.

— Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the
Cato Institute and author of Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science
They Don’t Want You to Know.

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