Another fly in the Climategate ointment

Oh dear, oh dear..

If you thought that the funny business going on at the Climate Research Unit at the UEA was an isolated incident...

Readers will probably still be laughing at Professor Phil Jones' statement that the CRU no longer had their 'raw' data but had 'value added' data instead.

You've probably also heard that the CRU data is only one of three or four sets of temperature records, so there's no story here, move along now.

Unfortunately - someone has been cooking the books in a rather cack-handed way...here's a taster of an excellent unpicking of the data for Australia

"...YIKES! Before getting homogenized [cooked], temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C...

...Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that?..."

Read the whole analysis here - well worth it and don't worry if you're not a science geek - anyone who's ever read a thermometer and has eyes can see what is going on.

As the author concludes: "Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming..."