Would you buy a used temperature record from these guys?

Bolt’s Post 28 February, 2010

Here Andrew Bolt claims that:

The university which tried to trick us on temperature records now tries to trick the parliamentary committee investigating its deceits.

So, the University of East Anglia tried to trick us on a temperature record, did they?

 

To trick us, this presumably would have to mean that they altered data and then published it either as data or as a graphic. Which data was it? Or, which graphic was it?

 

If there is no such data or graphic, then Bolt is clearly being, at best, misleading and deceptive, at worst defamatory.

 

Here’s what Phil Jones had to say:

Until the inquiry is over, he will stand aside from his directorship of the CRU. On the question of the science, however, he remains bristlingly defiant. He may have tripped up over the FoI requests, but nobody has laid a glove on the science. To prove his point, he spreads the table with graphs, tracing the outlines with his fingertip. He shows how the warming trend plotted by the CRU precisely matches the plots from two independent sources in America. “There, you see!” The three coloured lines precisely overlay each other, proof positive of scientific probity.

“I am obviously going to be much more careful about my emails in future. I will write every email as if it is for publication. But I stand 100% behind the science. I did not manipulate or fabricate any data, and I look forward to proving that to the Sir Muir Russell inquiry [the UEA’s independent review into allegations against the unit].”

And then, let’s look at the work done by one of Andrew’s own favoured academics on global warming, Dr Roy Spencer:

Spencer has done some New Work on the Recent Warming of Northern Hemispheric Land Areas:

Since it is always good to immerse yourself into a dataset to get a feeling for its strengths and weaknesses, I decided I might as well do a Jones-style analysis of the Northern Hemisphere land area (where most of the stations are located). Jones’ version of this dataset, called “CRUTem3NH”, is available here…

Similar to the Jones methodology, I then averaged all station month anomalies in 5 deg. grid squares, and then area-weighted those grids having good data over the Northern Hemisphere. I also recomputed the Jones NH anomalies for the same base period for a more apples-to-apples comparison. The results are shown in the following graph.

What does he find:

I’ll have to admit I was a little astounded at the agreement between Jones’ and my analyses, especially since I chose a rather ad-hoc method of data screening that was not optimized in any way. Note that the linear temperature trends are essentially identical; the correlation between the monthly anomalies is 0.91.

One data set only, certainly.

And the investigation will go on and provide either vindication or condemnation of Jones.

Bolt claims he provides facts and evidence for his assertions. Yet none is provided here. Why? If a data set or a graphic has been “tricked up”, why doesn’t he say which one? Because he doesn’t have any and none exists. In other words, Bolt has deceived and misrepresented yet again.