From examiner.com //
December 23, 2009 //

The UK Meteorological Office released what it described as temperature data for over a century and a half from more than 1500 land weather stations throughout the world, along with what the Met Office described as the code used to plot temperature trends for the time frame in question. But the data are apparently not the raw data, and questions remain as to the validity of the adjustment of the data, an inconsistency in reporting a lack of valid temperature measurements in one year, and the accuracy of the source code.

The Met Office states that the land station records, going back to 1850, came from the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). This has long been the understanding of the genesis of the HadCRUT dataset: the CRU collected land station data, and the Hadley Centre collected temperatures from ships at sea.

John Graham-Cummings was the first person to take note of the release, and to examine the source code for accuracy. Within hours, Graham-Cummings had found two possible errors. First, he found an apparent error in the code that caused the program to use suspect data in its data plots. Graham-Cummings introduced a quick correction to the code, and was able to produce a trend line similar to the official version, with this difference: the data point for the year 1855 is missing, and this gap in the data is not shown on the official version.

That’s a bit odd, but not serious. But it makes me suspect something: I’ll bet a mince pie that this code the Met Office has released is not the code they actually use to create CRUTEM3. I bet they wrote it especially for this release.

Blogger Bishop Hill took note of the release next, and of Graham-Cummings’ initial analysis. Subsequently Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit noted that the Hadley Centre had only last summer refused to release any such data to him when he had requested it, on the grounds that some of the data were subject to previous agreements that forbade data sharing. That any possible legal and/or diplomatic considerations were suddenly resolved, was not clear to McIntyre and still cannot be reliably discerned from the Met Office’ FAQ links. McIntyre speculated that the Met Office might have realized that their legal position was never sound and that they prepared the release to keep themselves out of legal peril.

Jeff Id at The Air Vent bluntly noted that even this release is not entirely satisfactory. (He misidentified the CRU as the agency doing the release; in fact the latest release comes from the Hadley Centre using CRU-generated material.) His major complaint is that these data are still not the raw station data in all cases. The Met Office says this to describe their own release:

The database consists of the “value added” product that has been quality controlled and adjusted to account for identified non-climatic influences. It is the station subset of this value-added product that we have released. Adjustments were only applied to a subset of the stations so in many cases the data provided are the underlying data minus any obviously erroneous values removed by quality control. The Met Office do not hold information as to adjustments that were applied and so cannot advise as to which stations are underlying data only and which contain adjustments.

The Met Office now appears to be saying that even it does not know which numbers are raw data and which are adjusted data, nor which adjustments were made.

The Air Vent post also compares the answers given in the FAQ with some of the e-mails in the CRU Archive, including many written by Phil Jones, now under suspension from his post as CRU Director.

Perhaps the most problematic answer from the Met Office is their answer to the question of how one can be sure of the global temperature record:

The methodology is peer reviewed. There are three independent sets of global temperature that all clearly show the rise in global temperatures over the last 150 years. Furthermore, the strong scientific evidence that climate is changing as a result of human influence is also based on the growing evidence that other aspects of the climate system are changing; these include the atmosphere getting moister, global rainfall patterns changing, reductions in snow cover, glacier volume, and Arctic sea ice, increases in sea level and changes in global scale circulation patterns. There are also numerous changes in phenological records which point towards a general warming and support the veracity of the instrumental record.

As Jeff Id and others have pointed out, the peer-review process, certainly at CRU and presumably elsewhere, is now known to be fatally flawed on account of such questionable practices of friend reviewing friend and the rejection of non-”friendly” papers on what appears to be an a priori determination based solely on the paper’s conclusion. Peer review is supposed to check premises, not conclusions.

But the worse problem is that the Met Office tries to argue that the temperature record is trustworthy because a raft of other evidence supports it. The difficulties with that statement are twofold. First and foremost, that other evidence might or might not support a given conclusion says nothing about the validity of the specific evidence under discussion. Second, the validity of the other evidence cited by the Met Office is in question. American and British residents, having only recently finished digging out from record snowfalls in their countries, might be inclined to dispute the finding of “reduction in snow cover.” More to the point, much of what the Met Office cites depends on a host of confounding variables in addition to temperature.

This Examiner has previously reported that the Hadley Centre’s connection to CRU and its largely disgraced scientists means that it might not be as innocent as it pretends. More recently, the Centre came under fire following reports that it had overstated the warming trend in Russia by excluding land station data from 40% of Russian territory and relied on 25% of stations concentrated mainly in areas of dense human habitation.

Separately, the CRU website appears to be back on-line, but their home page still asks for patience during a “rebuilding” of their site.