Hiding the facts in plain sight
<p>OK, this is lovely.  Remember Phil Jones of the CRU saying they had retained only &#8220;homogenized, value-added&#8221; data rather than raw measurements?  It seems that well before the CRU leak there was  <a href="http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2009/11/yet-more-stuff-we-always-suspected-but-its-nice-to-have-proof.html">strong circumstantial evidence</a> that much (perhaps all) of the supposed global-warming signal is accounted for by &#8220;adjustments&#8221; made to the data.</p>
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<p>Get a load of this graphic:</p>
<p><img src="http://www.coyoteblog.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/07/30/ushcn_corrections.gif"/></p>
<p>This is the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) telling us itself what the &#8220;adjustments&#8221; do to the U.S historical temperature record.  If you look over at the scale on the left, you&#8217;ll see that these &#8220;adjustments&#8221; explain about <s>80%</s> 50% of the supposed global-warming signal between 1900 and 2000.</p>
<p>Gee, does that shape look&#8230;familiar?  Why, yes.  Yes it does.  The Climate Skeptic post I lifted this from reproduces my plot of the  &#8220;VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!&#8221;.  It&#8217;s possible to make too much of the similarity, I think; the &#8220;decline&#8221; that VERY ARTIFICAL was &#8220;correcting&#8221; for was in tree-ring proxies for temperature, not measured ground temperature.  </p>
<p>Still&#8230;isn&#8217;t it curious that every time we dig into the supposedly &#8220;value added, homogenized&#8221; data, we find a similar pattern of &#8220;adjustments&#8221; in that oh-so-familiar hockey-stick shape?</p>
<p>Why, it&#8217;s almost as if the people doing the &#8220;adjusting&#8221; imposed their preconceptions on the data, fixing it to conform to pet theories that just happen to be lucrative funding sources as well.  But, no, that could <em>never</em> happen, could it?     </p>
<p>UPDATE: Estimate of error changed from 80% to 50% because the scale is Fahrenheit.  I waited to do this until I could get an AGW alarmist to commit to a specific correction, so I couldn&#8217;t be accused of shading the number to favor a skeptical position.</p>
