Sunday, December 13, 2009

The New York Times' Andy Revkin could have written this

But he didn't. And so the single best MSM article on ClimateGate comes from David Rose of the UK's Daily Mail. Bookmark this.

If you want to understand what "hide the decline" means, start here. This is simply astonishingly good reporting: accurate, in-depth, going to all the major sources. All I can say is that Rose must read Borepatch.

Well done, Mr. Rose.

UPDATE 13 December 2009 15:00: Roger Pielke, Jr. has a post up about how he has asked Rose for a correction of a misquote. I don't believe it changes the overall thrust of the Daily Mail's article.

3 comments:

Paladin said...

That's a great article, all right. Contrast that with this AP crap:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091213/ap_on_sc/climate_e_mails

Wherein they claim that after an exhaustive examination of the emails by a team of AP reporters, they determined that the scientists didn't make stuff up. The scientists just had "fleeting doubts" about the data.

TJP said...

"Last week, an article posted on a popular climate sceptic website analysed the data from the past 130 years in Darwin, Australia."

It does touch on everything--why not mention Willis Eschenbach by name? The point about the airport in Darwin is that the GHCN bases adjustments on the data of other, local thermometers, yet in the case of Darwin, there aren't any for the period of time in question, and there are inexplicable stepped adjustments in the latter half of the 20th century. This example is not unique.


Don't worry, though, the true believers aren't listening, as shown by this comment:

"The scientists choose to use a thermometer and then are criticised for this choice. If they'd have used tree-ring data then no doubt they would be criticised for that too. You can't have it both ways..."

Good grief, nobody said that all the data was invalid, just that 1) it's not a good idea to mix them up, and 2) careful examination of the idiosyncrasies of each is required before calling it "settled science". As it stands right now, a portion of "high quality" weather stations appear to be measuring population growth as much as temperature.

TJP said...

Oh, and here's a short guide on how to select stations to supply surface temp data.