Climategate: Three of the Four Temperature Datasets Now Irrevocably Tainted

With today’s revelation on Pajamas Media, only the Japan Meteorological Agency is left to save the warmists. Don’t bet on it. (Click here to see Horner discuss this article on PJTV.)

by Christopher Horner
http://pajamasmedia.com/
March 11, 2010

The warmist response to Climategate — the discovery of the thoroughly corrupt practices of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) — was that the tainted CRU dataset was just one of four independent data sets. You know. So really there’s no big deal.

Thanks to a FOIA request, the document production of which I am presently plowing through — and before that, thanks to the great work of Steve McIntyre, and particularly in their recent, comprehensive work, Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts — we know that NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) passed no one’s test for credibility. Not even NASA’s.

In fact, CRU’s former head, Phil Jones, even told his buddies that while people may think his dataset — which required all of those “fudge factors” (their words) — is troubled, “GISS is inferior” to CRU.

Really.

NASA’s temperature data is so woeful that James Hansen’s colleague Reto Ruedy told the USA Today weather editor:

“My recommendation to you is to continue using … CRU data for the global mean [temperatures]. … “What we do is accurate enough” — left unspoken: for government work — “[but] we have no intention to compete with either of the other two organizations in what they do best.”

To reiterate, NASA’s temperature data is worse than the Climategate temperature data. According to NASA.

And apparently, although these points were never stressed publicly before, NASA GISS is just “basically a modeling group forced into rudimentary analysis of global observed data.” But now, however, NASA GISS “happily [combines the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) data] and Hadley Center’s data” for the purpose of evaluating NASA’s models.

So — Climategate’s CRU was just “one of four organizations worldwide that have independently compiled thermometer measurements of local temperatures from around the world to reconstruct the history of average global surface temperature.”

But one of the three remaining sets is not credible either, and definitely not independent.

Two down, two to go.

Reto Ruedy refers his inquiring (ok, credulous) reporter to NCDC — the third of the four data sets — as being the gold standard for U.S. temperatures.

But NCDC has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere — Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts have found NCDC completely incredible, having made a practice out of not including cooler temperature stations over time, exaggerating the warming illusion.

Three out of the four temperature datasets stink, with corroboration from the alarmists. Second-sourced, no less.

Anyone know if Japan has a FOIA?

Christopher Horner is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.