Ronald Bailey, at Reason's Hit and Run blog, offers his take on what's being uncovered in the British Climate Research Unit document dump: Forget the Emails: What Will the Hacked Documents Tell Us?
He cites British statistician William Briggs, pointing out that we really don't know the historical temperature of the earth. We can guess, based on proxies and models, but it's still guessing:
One example from something called a “SOAP-D-15-berlin-d15-jj” document. A non-native English speaker shows a plot of various proxy reconstructions from which he wanted to “reconstruct millennial [Northern Hemisphere] temperatures.” He said, “These attempts did not show, however, converge towards a unique millennial history, as shown in Fig. 1. Note that the proxy series have already undergone a linear transformation towards a best estimate to the CRU data (which makes them look more similar, cf. Briffa and Osborn, 2002).”
In other words, direct effort was made to finagle the various reconstructions so that they agreed with preconceptions. Those efforts failed. It’s like being hit in the head with a hockey stick.
Briggs lists nine sources of error, of which the CRU accounts for one.
He continues:
I hope that a lot of independent researchers will be taking close looks at the CRU documents to check on the accuracy of their interpretations of climate data. Of course, this wouldn't be an issue if climate researchers had made their data publicly available in the first place.
Whole Briggs analysis here.
Quick Addendum: It turns out my hopes for independent analysis are being fulfilled. Over at CBS News, correspondent Declan McCullagh reports that independent programmers are now looking into CRU code and finding some pretty disturbing things...
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