On Climate Data, Trends and Peer Review

[struggle4progress]

November 30, 2009, 7:35 am
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

... Michael Schlesinger, a climatologist at the University of Illinois, explains why he sees the disclosed e-mails as a complete distraction from the body of evidence pointing to a human hand on the planet’s thermostat ...

1. CRU is not the only group in the world that is tracking the change in global-average near-surface temperature. There are at least three other groups, two in the U.S. (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA; and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA), and one in Japan (Japan Meteorological Agency, JMA).

2. As presented below, the temperature record of each of these groups (available at the URLs given at the bottom of this message) shows the same features: (i) a warming of about 0.9°C (1.6°F) over the past 150 years and (ii) natural variability with both short and long periods.

In our year-2000 published analysis of these data through 1997 (Causes of Global Temperature Changes During the 19th and 20th Centuries, Geophysical Research Letters, 27:14, 2137-2140; Natalia Andronova & Michael Schlesinger), we showed that this warming was predominantly due to people. An update of that analysis, which includes the observations since 1997, shows that the observed warming is overwhelmingly due to people.

4. Each of the four records above shows cooling in recent years. But, as is shown in these records, this recent cooling is nothing new ... The absolute worst thing that humanity could do is mistake a short-term natural cooling for the absence of human-caused global warming ...

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/more-on-the-climate-files-and-climate-trends/

[tabatha]

1. Thank you for that !!!

I was sick to my stomach about the crap that is now going around.
Stupid people who do not have the facts will distort this.

Could it be, that possibly when the dust settles, there will be more discussion and possibly more understanding that AGW is real, and there will be fewer skeptics.

Here's hoping for lemonade to be made from this lemon.

[struggle4progress]

2. The comments and responses here provide another useful resource:

The CRU hack
20 November 2009
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/

I've only read about 200 of the (now over 1000) comments and responses, but it's informative

[joshcryer]

4. I think the CRU hack was specifically designed to discredit RC and their posters.

It's basically, as one commenter noted, intimidation.

[joshcryer]

3. Kick.