Thursday, September 24, 2009

Isn't there a name for "We don't have that data anymore"

when they've recently given some of it to someone?

Oh yeah, it's bullshit.
Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded:

Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.

The statement about “data storage” is balderdash. They got the records from somewhere. The files went onto a computer. All of the original data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the mid-1980s. I had all of the world’s surface barometric pressure data on one such tape in 1979.

If we are to believe Jones’s note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?

2 comments:

Keith said...

Smells like fudge, looks like fudge...

I'd like to see some follow up sampling of some of the proxy temperature measures, for example tree rings and oxygen isotopes in sediments, just to see how they compare with the past, now that we have some actual temperature measurements.

Strangely I don't hear of anyone wanting to go take the couple hours drive and five minutes walk from the forestry road with a 2 pound auger to sample bristlecone pines. I wonder why not?

Firehand said...

Well that's work(that might not confirm what we want to find)!