From Russia, with love
<p>Oh, it just keeps getting better.  As the Copenhagen conference <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/17/copenhagen-talks-brink-collapse">collapses</a>, word comes from Russia that the Moscow-based Institute for Economic Analysis has found evidence of skulduggery and fraud in the CRU&#8217;s treatment of Russian climate data.</p>
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<p><a href="http://en.rian.ru/papers/20091216/157260660.html">This story from Kommersant</a>, via Novosti, seems to be a close to a primary source as we can get in English. Here is the relevant part (emphases mine):</p>
<blockquote><p>
Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.</p>
<p><b>The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory.</b></p>
<p>Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country&#8217;s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by <b>only 25% of such stations</b> in its reports.</p>
<p>Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.</p>
<p><b>The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.</b></p>
<p>The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.</p>
<p>On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.</p>
<p><b>IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.</b></p>
<p><b>The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world&#8217;s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.</b></p>
<p>Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.
</p></blockquote>
<p>For those coming in late, we&#8217;re not talking about tree-ring measurements and paleioclimate here. These are the surface-temperature measurements that the IPCC relied on most heavily in its apocalyptic we&#8217;re-all-gonna-fry projections.</p>
<p>And now it looks like the &#8220;team&#8221;  and their allies have been caught playing fraudulent games with that data.  No surprise to me; reports of cherrypicking and suspiciously convenient &#8220;adjustments&#8221; have been coming in from Australia, New Zealand, and China over the last week.</p>
<p>Climategate isn&#8217;t over.  Oh, no indeed &#8211; these reports strongly suggest the most damaging revelations are still to come, when people start doing serious auditing of the &#8220;homogenized, value-added&#8221; data in comparison with raw datasets from real stations.</p>
<p>I think we&#8217;re going to find that the scale of active fraud by the AGW-alarmist crowd will dumbfound almost everybody. Well, almost everybody except me. I&#8217;ll be the guy cackling madly and yelling &#8220;I told you so!&#8221; </p>
