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posted by martyb on Monday February 09 2015, @09:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the heated-discussion dept.

The Telegraph reports "The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever"

From the article:

"When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified."

It seems that the norm in science may well be to cherry pick the results, but the story points to evidence that some climate data may have been falsified to fit the theory.

Sure, it's clickbait, but we've recently discussed cases where science and scientific consensus has gotten it so very wrong. Can we trust the science if we can't trust the data?

 
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  • (Score: 1) by anfieldsierra on Wednesday February 11 2015, @09:26PM

    by anfieldsierra (3609) on Wednesday February 11 2015, @09:26PM (#143775)

    I personally find it hard to be believe that a some people in rural Paraguay in the 60's would want to affect the global averages by changing some numbers. It is far more likely they had reasons for adjusting the numbers (new equipment, influence of local environment, etc etc). That is not to say that calibration can not be done wrongly, and who knows, the data in question may really be bad.

    You're completely off base. People in rural Paraguay didn't have anything to do with this. The question is why the "climate scientists" have decided that whatever happened in rural Paraguay in the 60's was somehow incorrect and now needs to be changed.

    Unfortunately, in the past, and in remote areas, it was not always carefully documented why and how exactly the data was adjusted. This is a lot better now (and we can thank the denialist for that), but you cannot do much about all these old numbers.

    You've completely misunderstood the nature of the raw vs adjusted data. No-one in the 60s/in remote areas adjusted the temperature measurements. The old numbers are the raw un-adjusted data. The adjustments have been made recently, after the fact.

  • (Score: 2) by moondrake on Wednesday February 11 2015, @10:57PM

    by moondrake (2658) on Wednesday February 11 2015, @10:57PM (#143843)

    well, the various sources did quite a bad job at explaining who when made what changes. So my first impression when I posted this was that it happened locally.

    But, as expressed by various other people here, even if changes were made afterwards, there can be many good reasons for them.