So how did the climate data get changed?

I've been blogging about the changes made to the climate databases for five years now - this scandal has been around for quite some time.

OK, we don't want a jump in the historical record if you move a station or replace a thermometer with a better one.

But. All the Climatologists in the world will look at this data. How much do the adjustments change the results?

We don't know, but people are starting to look. They're starting to find that adjustments change the data a lot. They change the data so much that they show that the earth is warming when the raw data may show that it's cooling.

Let me say that again: Thermometers may be showing that the Earth is cooling, but adjustments to this data show a rapid temperature rise.

After all this time, it's good to see this in the Mainstream News:

Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy.

The scope of the data adjustment issue is really astounding:

An interesting question is how much of the 20th Century's warming came from adjustments, rather than from raw data? A picture is worth a thousand words:
What you're looking at is the annual adjustment made to the raw temperature, for each year in the 20th Century. You'll notice that almost no adjustments are made to years up to 1960, and then a very interesting shape appears in the graph.

A hockey Stick.

And what Science®-denying Tea-Bagging place did I get that?  From the Fed.Gov's weathermen, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

So the data are fiddled to the point that over 80% of the reported warming cannot be found in the data as recorded.  Its in the adjustments to the data after the fact.  And it's not just North America:

A week ago [November 2009 - Borepatch], a group called the Climate Science Coalition of New Zealand made a bombshell announcement: all of New Zealand's reported 1°C warming between 1850 and 2000 was due to adjustments. Here's the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) reported warming graph:

The Climate Science Coalition folks went back and looked at the raw data by itself. It looks different:

Well, well, well. OK, so it looks like the Kiwis and the Yanks have crummy government scientists. Sweden, too. Who else is in the club? How about the CRU? Actually, we can't tell what their adjustments look like, because they've lost all the raw data. Sorry about that.

Any the implication from five years ago is as fresh today:

Like I said recently, almost every climate scientist uses data from one of a very small number of data sets. If the people who control the data sets can inject a warming signal, then you will indeed reach a consensus that the climate has been warming. All scientists using those data sets will find the warming signal. The science will, in a sense, be "settled".

It will be wrong, but it will be settled.

And what's worse, scientists knew that something was very, very wrong. One widely-quoted CRU email fairly shrieks bewilderment:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.

The data are surely wrong, because the science is settled. I mean, everyone sees a warming signal!

And now to the title of this post.  Clearly the data have been changed in a persistent manner, reducing older temperatures and increasing newer temperatures to the point that nearly all reported warming come from this manipulation (no, I do not think that the word is too strong).  So who did it, and when?

Some of this is done via computer program:

In 1972, there was a Weather station at the Ripogenus Dam. It collected temperature readings every day. Those readings were included in NASA's GISS temperature reading data set. Its readings were included in GISS until 2006, along with data from thousands of other weather stations. There's really only one little problem.

The Ripogenus Dam weather station was decommissioned in 1995.

So for ten years, GISS reported temperature readings from a station that didn't exist. How? Filnet.

This quite frankly is one reason I like the satellite data records (UAH and RSS) better - it measures temperature globally without the need for surface stations, "infilling" and adjustment.  Odd how the satellite record shows no warming for nearly twenty years.

But if the adjustments were made by computer, who checked that work for sanity?  Who audited the code, and the output?  If the answer is "nobody", doesn't that tell us how much faith to put in this "settled science"?  A computer program is precisely the place to put these changes, for plausible deniability.

And who wrote the code?  How much money did they make from doing this?  Who issued the grant? There are quite frankly a lot of whos involved here.  I would like to see names named, along with a list of grant funds received.

I am now at the point where I don't have the slightest idea what the climate is doing, at least since about 1860 when we came out of the Little Ice Age.  It seems likely that the 1930s and 1940s were hotter than today,, at least based on raw data collected at the time.  It's a fact that the hottest day ever recorded in the USA was in 1912.  Odd how a century of accelerating warming can't beat that.

You can't adjust a record.