Government Climate Scientists circle the wagon on crummy data

For a while it looked like the serious data quality questions about the historical climate databases might be addressed honestly.  Oh well:

Apparently the NCDC Press Office sent an official response to Politifact, which Watts obtained:


Are the examples in Texas and Kansas prompting a deeper look at how the algorithms change the raw data?
No – our algorithm is working as designed.

All right then.  Judy Curry sums the situation up:

As Wayne Eskridge writes, this issue is a political hot potato.   I hope that the NCDC scientists are taking this more seriously than is reflected by the statement from the Press Office.  I hope that NCDC comes forward with a more meaningful statement in response to the concerns that have been raised.

I’m hoping that we can see a more thorough evaluation of the impact of individual modifications to the raw data for individual stations and regions, and a  detailed comparison of Berkeley Earth with the NOAA USHCN data sets. 

...

NOAA needs to clean up these data sets.  Most importantly,  better estimates of uncertainty in these data are needed, including the structural uncertainty associated with different methods (past and present) for producing the temperature fields.

It is very possible that the NOAA scientists can't clean up the data sets, because political pressure from the current Administration.  The analogy to Progressives is the lead up to the Iraq war and allegations about changing the intelligence estimates to justify the invasion.  Here it's changing the "intelligence estimates" to justify preferred climate programs.  These programs will be massively regressive, falling disproportionately on the poor - as indeed almost all "green" programs do.

It's almost like a Democratic Party war on science or something.