Historical weather reports were reported to trace the movement of warm and cold fronts so as to provide a means of 48 hour forecasting at best. Some data served to distinguish soltices and growing seasons. Much of the the equipment is of variable quality as are the measurements by variable uality personnel. The equipment is only accurate to a single degree of reading, if that, and the time of diurnal data capture was a temporal variation not thouhgt important.

Yet along come ‘climate researchers’ who are trying to deduce centenial climate changes of a few hundredths of a single degree, many years later. No matter how much you average data reported in single degrees your average cannot have any validity to the degree plusor minus the third decimal place of a degree. Yet they pervert the data as if it did.

Averages of Averages mean exactly nothing.

What is the World’s average temperature and what does it mean, if anything? Nothing at all to a weather report and of limited utility to a climate report. True climate measurements are only now coming into existence, such as the Earth’s Radaition Budget measurement, from the ERBEE satellites, the polar ice extent as measured by satellites, and the calorimetric measure of the Oceans’ heat content, over time.

Stonyground, not to defend, in any way, shape, or form the massive piles of bovine excrement that pass from the mouths of AGW supporters, Climate, like Economics, is in fact one of the most complex subjects tackled by human beings. It is hardly easy to get across what IS actually known, much less what is suspected, and why, without some degree of background understanding. Economics, in particular, for example, has A LOT of particularly counter-intuitive elements to it. The number of people who fail to grasp why the Broken Window Fallacy is a fallacy is legion. And half of them still won’t get it even after you explain it to them. Another particularly counter-intuitive bit is that the Fed cannot — yes, cannot — “save” money in the sense that you or I can do so. It’s inherently impossible, by definition. Most everyone reading this is going to boggle at that claim. It’s utterly and indisputably true, though. *I* certainly did the first time I encountered it, but I realized, after explanation, that it is, in fact, true. And those are really basic “facts” about economics. Climate is worse, if anything, because we’ve had the capacity to study it (which utterly and completely requires modern computers) only for the last 50 years or so. And much of the rules we do know are more rules-of-thumb than hard-and-fast understanding supported by mathematical rigor.

My point here is that it’s not nefarious intent behind the ACTUAL SCIENCE that makes it seem that “I think that the aim is to make the process appear to be hugely difficult and complex and far too technical for lay people to understand” — it really, really is, in at least some cases, that complex. That’s not a defense for the AGW crowd, it’s just to help grasp that the science really isn’t all that simple.

That’s part of the reason it’s such a great place for the crooks and charlatans of AGW to operate in…

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Yes, it does. Otherwise how do you know they are, in fact, facts? How do you know that Media Matters isn’t telling you “facts”?

Personally, I’ve had a hard time tracking this story to make sure that it is factual. I find it cross-posted on “The Register” and “Watts Up” and “Dakota Voice” and places like that.

Sometimes people have a hard time telling the difference between implication, opinion, insinuation, urban legend and fact.

“the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) is not a “climate change organization”; it is an economic and social policy think tank headed by Andrei Illarionov, an economist, climate skeptic, and fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute; moreover, the report was not about “their” data — it simply purported to analyze how the UK Met Office used data from Russian meteorological stations.”

Just a thought.

Collating and analysing the raw data in order to produce some informative graphs is hardly rocket science though is it? Especially if the actual direction of temperature changes is the thing that you are trying to pin down.

Why anybody resists this is beyond me.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/are-the-cru-data-suspect-an-objective-assessment/comment-page-5/#comment-149688 (#211)

“Well, journalism is in trouble in Russia too… The relevant figure from the IEA report is here which show the difference between the their ‘all station’ index and the HadCRU index for Russia as a whole. Since there was no check for inhomogeneities or jumps in the IEA index, it doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny, but even if it were fine, the differences in the 20th C trend are small. The whole ‘someone made adjustments/screened stations therefore fraud!’ line of argument is getting very old.”

Apparently, losing 0.6 degrees on a 2.0 degree trend is peanuts. Not to mention that:

* The IEA say in the article that if they made adjustments for human urban island effects and the like, they would have shown even less warming than they saw on raw data.

* The IEA also show that the stations used by CRU were far from being the best ones in terms of spatial coverage or, say, data continuity. Instead, somehow CRU ended up selecting those stations that were showing the largest warming.

* The IEA also show that even after CRU did their cherry-picking, records for at least some stations have been altered in a way that emphasizes warming trends (by a factor of 2 in the example).

There is also a great irony in a CRU guy bringing up the question of standing up to scrutiny. That’s coming from the same CRU who don’t (and can’t, by their own admission) tell us exactly what adjustments they did on what data, for years.